I now feel it necessary to mention that this character was based on a real person. .
She’s the first person I thought of when I read this story. It boggles the mind.
I think I would call the EMTs before the day was out. Seriously, if someone is just sitting on the can for hours and hours on end, but yet saying they are physically fine, then something must be wrong mentally (or they’re lying about nothing being physically wrong.) Either way, it would seem good for them to get medical attention.
I can’t stop thinking about this. Two years!
Two years ago, I wasn’t yet pregnant with Whatsit the Youngest.
When I was at Whatsit Jr.'s t-ball games… this woman was on the toilet. When I went on vacation to Seattle… she was on the toilet. My entire pregnancy with WtY… on the toilet. Summer came, then fall, then winter, spring, summer again… on the toilet.
WHAT THE HELL.
If J.G. Ballard, John Waters and Marcel Duchamp all collaborated on a screenplay, I think it would go something like this.
It had to have been bad mexican food
*She was afraid to come out of the bathroom,
on the toilet she sat, day and night,
she was afraid to come out of the bathroom,
now the growth on her bum is a fright.
She’s got an itsy-bitsy white and shiny
toilet seat stuck to her hiney…*
I know this is the Dope, and most anything is fair game, but I have to admit that I find nothing at all funny about this. That poor, poor woman.
I didn’t think this happened in Germany. 
“…but it’s the first time I’ve ever seen one Framed!”
I don’t get how she slept without slipping off it, even the first night let alone the next 700 or so.
What could they possibly charge the boyfriend with? She’s an adult, and it doesn’t say anywhere that he was her caregiver.
She chose to sit on a toilet for two years; obviously, she needed serious psychiatric help but failing to refer someone to a mental health professional is not a crime.
There was a similar case of Genie, b. 1957, who "During the day…was tied to a child’s potty chair in diapers; " until the age of 13.
This source has more information: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-woman-in-bathroom,1,6748357.story
Is this really all that similar, though? Genie was feral, abused, a child, etc…this is more like a woman who just wouldn’t leave the bathroom.
I wonder what Christmas was like? Did the guy put a tree up in the bathroom and leave her a present under it?
It sounds like severe agoraphobia to me. Most agoraphobics won’t leave the house; for her, her safety zone was even smaller. Poor woman.
Imagine what she left under the tree…
The second article lists the boyfriend at age 36 and says he’d been taking care of her for 16 years, meaning that there must’ve been some serious issues already (obviously). Not to mention the statements of her feeling “safe” in there and it regarding prior abuse, I would agree that there’s probably a large possibility that Ms. Babcock does indeed suffer from mental illness. How very, very awful. I hope this means she’ll get the help she needs, as well as he does. It can’t be healthy to go through a situation like this, even from a bystander’s point of view.
ETA: Or what Brynda said.
Hey, my toilets have gone for longer without being clogged. And no, I don’t scrub them weekly or anything, just “colored water” and the occasional dash of “WC Duck” (or whatever it’s called in English, I’ve only used the Spanish and French versions).
At the bottom of the first article it indicates she sort of grew up imprisoned in her own house. That doesn’t make the even less bizarre, but it’s an indication of someone who can feel safer not moving at all than doing anything.
I’m a little confused…the article says she lived in the bathroom, but moved around, and that they had a “normal” relationship. So when did she sit down and decide not to stand up again?
I hate to think that during the time she refused to come off the toilet he insisted on “relations.”
:eek: