69-Year-Old Woman Trapped in Bathroom 20 Days

Twenty days. Alone. Trapped in a room with no window.

For many, that may seem like a nightmare, but for one elderly French woman living by herself, it was her reality.

On Tuesday, Parisian firefighters broke into the 69-year-old's apartment and broke down the bathroom door to free her, Agence France Presse reports.

Twenty days prior to the rescue, the woman, as yet unnamed by news agencies, became trapped in her bathroom when the lock broke.

Hoping to alert neighbors, she tapped on the pipes at night. The neighbors, however, said they thought it was a fellow resident simply undertaking a home repair, so they started a petition to stop them.

"You could hear banging sounds, like a hammer, even at night," one neighbor said, reports the BBC. "But we thought they were doing work at night. We said: 'They are going too far! They are preventing us from sleeping!' If we had known....'"

Eventually, some of her neighbors realized they had not seen the pensioner in a while, so they called emergency services.

When firefighters broke into her second-floor apartment in the Parisian suburb of Epinay-sous-Senart, they found her lying on the ground in the bathroom in a "very weakened" state, BBC reports.

The woman said she survived by drinking tap water.

She is now recovering in the hospital.