85-year-old recovering after getting trapped in his bath for five days

An 85-year-old man lay helplessly trapped in his bath for five days after he accidentally fell in and didn’t have the strength to lift himself out. Frail widower Michael ‘Patsy’ Larkin spent an agonising five days and nights without food, light or heat, unable to escape from the confines of the high-sided tub. The pensioner survived by drinking water from the sink next to his head. He was able to reach across to the tap by using his clean shaving mug as a glass.

He was forced to lie shivering in his own urine during the ordeal, and spent the time desperately scrabbling at the wall tiles until his fingertips bled and the skin peeled away from his hands as he tried to climb out. “I haven’t a clue how it happened,” he said from his hospital bed. “I’d come home from shopping and went to the bathroom. I must’ve somehow fallen over and knocked myself out, because I woke up in the bath and my head was bleeding from hitting it on the taps.”



Retired engineer Patsy says he didn’t even cry for help because he knew nobody would hear him from his flat in Powell Road, Lower Clapton, no matter how loudly he shouted. “But I never lost faith that I would get out,” he added. “I believe in God. Even though I knew I was getting weaker and weaker. It was lucky that I still had my coat on when I fell because the heating was off and it got very cold.” Patsy, who lost his wife 25 years ago and does not have any children, is still recovering in hospital where he is being treated for bedsores on his back and bottom and cuts to his arm, head, and hands.

He became trapped on Monday, November 7, and was finally rescued on Saturday, November 12, when friends at his regular pub, the London Tavern, became concerned about him. Landlord Thomas Kerns sent customer ‘Blondie’ to Patsy’s flat, and he heard the pensioner’s cries when he knocked on the door. He ran back to the pub, in Rendlesham Road, and the landlord called an ambulance. Police forced open the front door. “There’s not many alive who can tell a story like that,” Thomas said. “People die of less – and younger than him too.”