To find what’s happened to Michael Mosley quite anxiety provoking

[Glasto73lover]

It’s that idea of never really knowing what’s going to happen- the idea that we walk such a fine line in life. If you think too much about it, you probably wouldn’t leave the house.!

A close family member died suddenly and tragically a decade ago - literally dropped dead at home age 48 - something went pop in their head. So you genuinely don’t know when your time is up.

It’s that idea of a chain of consequence that can go so horribly wrong too- people always say ‘oh but you could get hit by a bus’ - stuff like this actually makes me really anxious. So many what ifs.

For Michael Moseley - a chain of probably inconsequential decisions may have led to his death- not having a phone on him, choosing to undertake a walk that in the U.K. is nothing but in that heat, was devastating and probably caused his death.

It makes me anxious that I won’t know if I am making those decisions - am I making sense? I think as I have got older, I have become more anxious and risk averse (thanks menopause) and as a result, you could end up not leaving the house. How do you choose a sensible approach? Not too much risk but some!

But I also want to live my life too!! I guess I find incidents like this quite difficult!

I guess always having a phone, not undertaking walks in intense heat in an unfamiliar place etc are the common sense points that will come out of this tragedy.

Aibu to find it anxiety provoking tho?!

Agree, not to minimise what op is feeling but it's just something that makes us confront our own mortality and realise we have very little control over our lives and we are kidding ourselves if we think otherwise.

@BonifaceBonanza

He would have no reason to think before setting out that he would get lost.

Strange thing to say. No one would set out on a walk with an expectation that they'd get lost! But sensible people still take precautions, such as having a charged mobile phone, a map, proper clothing, a good water supply, etc etc.

I know the Mountain Rescue and Cave Rescue organisations (and also RNLI) despair at the number of people they have to rescue who've taken few, if any, precautions, done virtually no planning etc. None of them "expected" to get lost or fall and break a leg or sprain an ankle, or get cut off by the tide etc., but the ones who took no precautions and did little planning are the ones who end up needing to be rescued, and have an increased risk of not making it alive. The ones who take precautions can still have accidents, can still get lost, etc., but are more likely to get help quicker.

I tend to think that his poor judgement leading to the decisions that proved fatal was caused by the early stages of heat stroke. The reason given for him walking back was that he felt unwell.
Noel Cowerd was correct about mad dogs and English men.

My dad (older than MM) got heatstroke from sitting in the conservatory in East Lancashire. Didn't die as someone else came in the house noticed and called an ambulance for him but probably would have done if he lived on his own. Sitting in a conservatory in Burnley isn't up there with most risky activity.........

Could he have been preoccupied with something, was he enjoying the walk and the breeze with his mind totally absorbed by other things, so that it almost wasn’t even a conscious decision to keep going
That's a good point. Obviously no one know if it is applicable in this case but I have definitely done this. I was wandering round Longridge fell, somewhere I know extremely well, preoccupied with a problem that was going round and round in my head. When I snapped out of my thoughts I didn't have a clue where I was. This was a place I used to three times a week for years when I lived in Lancashire. It was really disconcerting.

Given millions of women live with men the fact that two die a week actually means the risk on an individual level is very small. If millions of women went hiking by themselves in relatively dangerous territory probably a lot more than two a week would die.

In some ways, yes. Such as the very low risks of suffering one of the many types of cancer with no known lifestyle nor genetic reason. But, with cancer, many types ARE caused by lifestyle choices. So whilst no one can mitigate and take precautions against the former, they can certainly make lifestyle decisions to help avoid the latter.

In life, there are many risks, some avoidable, some not, some partially avoidable, some you can mitigate against, some you can plan to help avoid, some you can't. Of course, no one can mitigate against the space shuttle crashing on your house whilst you're watching Corry, but that is the extreme. There are multiple ways of reducing risk to put you in the best possible possible of not suffering a catastrophic event with planning, precautions, and ultimately it's your own choice whether to take the risk of doing something more risky than average based on your own evaluation of the consequences if things go wrong.

Trouble is, people seem very poor at evaluating risk and preparation to mitigate risks. If you fail to prepare then prepare to fail!

MM don’t have a phone with him to take, clearly didn’t imagine he would need it, and due to his age would have been perfectly used to walking without it.
Furthermore no doubt if he’d rung for help when he started to feel ill the outcome would have been the same by the time anyone could have reached him.

I never said you can completely avoid risk! Shit happens. But sitting in a hot conservatory on a hot day is clearly riskier than sitting in the cooler/darker lounge!

I think whoever mentioned attitude to risk has got this one spot on. Some people are hugely risk averse, some have a gung ho attitude. MM was clearly towards the latter on a scale.
I imagine almost everyone reading this, if they were to look on at the image below, view from Pedi, looking left to those fateful mountains, wouldn't even dream of embarking on a walk in that direction in the conditions at that time.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/FfuGQo25aej78qwj8

Yes but people aren’t risking their lives looking for them. If you (or anyone else) is walking in inhospitable or higher risk areas and are injured or lost, others have to risk life and limb to look for you.

People need to take responsibility for themselves, so yes, they should be partly blamed for overeating. No one forces them to overeat. I do say partly because it’s also the government’s fault for allowing supermarkets to sell so much junk.

MM don’t have a phone with him to take, clearly didn’t imagine he would need it, and due to his age would have been perfectly used to walking without it.
It was not due to his age that he didn't have one. He's 67, mobile phones have been around for 30 years !
He was an advocate of walking without your mobile to enjoy living in the moment. I listened to that on one's of his podcasts.

saying that there are people who "get away with things" means that people who don't plan and risk assess will be as safe as people who do is plain silly!

this absolutely.....also proper planning prevents piss poor performance

Yes I agree with a happy gappy medium of what we normally have in this country, that legislation is going to change. However, unfortunately many people who are ill are disorientated/confused and wouldn’t have the sense to pull a cord before collapsing, even if they did decide to find a disabled toilet with one in. Also a door doesn’t need to be locked- a body will prevent it opening (I know from experience). The new door designs that are inward opening will have to be able to be opened from the outside and open outwardly too - so there is recognition of emergency situations.

Yes the stable door American style ones are very different from the ones you get in this country. Interestingly the ‘evidence’ for full enclosure in published UK government documents originated from an American source that had this one quote:
‘A better solution, supported by many transactivists, and increasingly found in trendy nightclubs and restaurants, is to eliminate gender-segregated facilities entirely and treat the public restroom as one single open space with fully enclosed stalls.’
That was the ‘evidence and literature’ in a government commissioned report looking at toilet design for people with long term health conditions last year - so from that all new UK designs that mention door and partition height, even for the ambulant single sex toilet (for people who are frailer) have been designed as fully enclosed. It’s a false equivalence.

It’s also why it is incredibly difficult to talk about safety because not only do people value privacy over safety, but also it becomes a political hot potato. This is also why I have tried to campaign whilst keeping somewhat anonymous because of the inconvenient truth. Also the strong evidence between assaults and fully enclosed private spaces in public areas is something I struggle with drawing attention to.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission were not interested in the fact this discriminates against medically vulnerable, women and older people because there’s no evidence. They said I had to send in reports of deaths/ injuries after the legislation with proof the enclosed design led to the death. Then they would investigate. They emailed me an incident form!

It’s obvious it’s a timebomb. There’s no point having defibrillators on the wall and toilets you can get into easily, if you don’t know the person could be dying on the floor next to you - because there’s a full height, acoustically-sound partition and door between you.

It’s depressing as it’s so bloody obvious. Early detection matters - look at any stroke or heart attack website for much time matters. You multiply up the number of lives altered, people who will collapse/ get assaulted behind the new toilet designs and will have to rely on someone else somehow guessing what is going on. Plus the assaults that could have been prevented in the first place.

It’s about prevention and safeguarding.

@VenusEnvyXX thank you for asking where you can find out more. I am wondering, since nobody in government and the press is taking me up on this, how to campaign more effectively to try and get the gaps put in the design before October. There are so many documents I have read and have analysed now. I can send hyperlinks to the main ones for anyone who wants. With the election, it’s very difficult to get anyone’s attention.

Going back to Michael Mosley and the OP, there have been incidences that make me very aware of collapses and can be more anxious. However, turn the negative anxiety into doing something positive about it. That’s what I am trying to do. Living your life to the fullest is a bit cliche but true. Learn from it, do what you can, but that is all.

I think it epitomises the difference between men and women. DF used to do this - go out for a short walk on holiday and then decide to extend it enroute and we'd all be wondering where he was. By contrast whenever I go for a run I do a mental checklist of do I have a phone bank card, emergency £10 on me. I'm doing a bit of trail running at the moment so I even take a paper map with me in case I get lost with no signal. I also always leave the route planner open on my laptop so that people will know where to look if something did go wrong. I think that MM's behaviour seems reckless to us because as women we have to be so much more risk averse whereas he'll just have thought that it looked like a good walk to explore.

Yes but back to personality types, I think that would not be how they process the risk, with my Dad who I could
imagine doing something similar 10 years ago as he is late 70s, it wouldn’t occur to him. My Dad was living abroad in his late 60s in a country where the infrastructure is not amazing and the pavements aren’t maintained and safe the further out of the city you go, after a night out he insisted he just got out of a cab near a junction as his house was around the corner and he wanted some fresh air and to see the stars, the taxi driver advised him not to but he did it anyway and fell down a hole, he broke his leg and following that was a difficult 2 years for him as the various things went wrong.

I too date from the pre mobile phone age. It doesn't prevent me from using it as an additional safety factor. The ringer, or indeed the phone, can be turned off or set to do not disturb to get the same freedom without losing the safety factor.

You see I would never be able to do that, enjoy living in the moment (while out alone) without my phone. The absence of my phone would give me anxiety as I’d worry that if anything happened to me (be it injury or illness or anything else unplanned) I’d be stuck. I do though overthink everything, but to be honest I prefer it that way as I’m a big believer in self preservation.

I realise that what I’m really not liking here is the undercurrent of “blame” in this case

Yes, I agree to an extent although when I was young I was pretty risk averse. That reminds me of when we were children my Dad would insist on extensive and long walks, he was a Geography and Geology graduate and was always want to educate us on the natural world wherever that happened to be. On a couple of occasions my parents did have arguments about is as my Mum would want to turn back and thought it was unfair on us.

saying that there are people who "get away with things" means that people who don't plan and risk assess will be as safe as people who do is plain silly!
Indeed often people under 25 who often don't fully appreciate all risks, people that have had a few drinks on a night out and decide to walk home because a taxi queue is too long. Maybe someone us really hungry amd decides to go to a cafe that hadn't got 5 stars from environmental health but no where else is open etc etc.
People can plan but things can change that you didn't expect.
Realistically are we all silly because sometimes what we had planned fails?

There are infinite number of reasons why things can go wrong on a day to day basis. Not one person can plan for everything.

I don't! My late husband was a global safety manager for a large company and did motorcycle training for both RoSPA and the IAM He was pretty damn risk averse as were his colleagues and fellow trainers.

Did he not know that mobile phones have an on/off switch? He could have enjoyed his "mobile free" walk by simply turning it off, and then he'd have still had it and been able to call for help when he got into difficulties.