The patient had had a triple bypass operation ten day earlier. After some days in the cardiac intensive care unit after surgery, he was transferred to a private medical surgical room and was receiving physical therapy. About fifteen minutes after his physical therapist returned him to the chair in his room following therapy, the patient got up to use the bathroom.

   He fell in the bathroom. There was a prompt response by a nurse and a nurse’s aide to his bathroom call bell. They found him on the floor. There was urine on the floor and on the bottom cuffs of the legs of his pajamas.

   In his lawsuit against the hospital, the patient claimed negligence on the part of the hospital in that the floor of the bathroom was wet and glistening when he entered the bathroom that morning.

   However, the hospital’s housekeeping records indicated the room had not as yet been mopped that day. The patient could not produce a witness to substantiate that his bathroom had been mopped while he was with the physical therapist. Thus the Supreme Court of Alabama, in reviewing the record of the evidence from the trial court, was not able to conclude that the bathroom had been mopped and left in a wet and slippery condition as the patient asserted in his lawsuit.