North Carolina woman, 82, survives nine days trapped in her bathtub after fall

Joan Rivet told the Mountaineer she took a step backwards in her bathroom and toppled over into her tub. Photograph: artbokeh/Getty Images/iStockphoto View image in fullscreen Joan Rivet told the Mountaineer she took a step backwards in her bathroom and toppled over into her tub. Photograph: artbokeh/Getty Images/iStockphoto North Carolina woman, 82, survives nine days trapped in her bathtub after fall Joan Rivet drank water she managed to splash up to her face by turning faucet on with her foot An 82-year-old North Carolina woman says she survived falling in her bathtub and being trapped there for nine days by turning the faucet on with her foot and drinking water that she managed to splash up to her face – all while drifting in and out of consciousness. Joan Rivet recently shared her remarkable survival story with North Carolina’s The Mountaineer newspaper, providing an extreme example of the kinds of emergencies that can face the millions of older Americans who fall by accident annually, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates . Such falls are prevalent enough that in the 1980s they served as the premise of the LifeAlert medical alarm and protection company’s commercials which thrust the phrase “ I’ve fallen – and I can’t get up ” into the US lexicon. Furthermore, on Sunday, 84-year-old Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell revealed it was a fall that led to a 14 June hospitalization which had kept him out of the public eye for weeks. In her case, Rivet, a widow since 2023 living by herself in a mountain home in the North Carolina community of Clyde, told the Mountaineer from a physical rehabilitation facility bed where she was recovering that the act of prayer comforted her as she waited more than a week for help. “I stayed away from the dark side of the whole situation because once you go down there – how do you get out?” the outlet quoted her as saying. Sheriff Bill Wilke of Haywood county, North Carolina, confirmed deputies with his office found Rivet on 10 June after her brother, Bill Lesko, who lives in Georgia, called them to check on her wellbeing. Lesko became concerned when his sister, who lives five hours from him, had not returned his calls checking in on her, which occur at least weekly, as the Mountaineer reported. Lesko had reportedly first called her neighbors, who noticed Rivet’s car was in the driveway – but there had been no signs of movement inside. Deputies arrived to find Rivet semi-conscious in the bathtub. She later told the Mountaineer that she had been getting ready for bed on 1 June when she took a step backwards in the bathroom and toppled over into her tub, coming down with the shower curtain and rod. Rivet hurt her back and realized she couldn’t pull herself up out of the tub, she recounted to the Mountaineer. With her telephone beyond reach in another room, she yelled for help, with her cat, Phoebe, the home’s only other occupant, meowing alongside her. But her neighbors couldn’t hear h