Hospital urges jury to ignore `innuendo' and `theatrics' 

One October day in 1998, Sharon and Bill Shore made a decision that ``will haunt them for the rest of their lives,'' their lawyer told an inquest yesterday. 

``The decision they made was to take their beloved daughter Lisa to the Hospital for Sick Children in order to stop, or at least reduce, her pain. 

``Sharon and Bill placed Lisa's care and her life in the hands of the doctors and nurses at the hospital,'' Frank Gomberg continued. ``That trust was cruelly betrayed and Lisa is dead forever.'' 

Gomberg was delivering his closing address to the coroner's jury that will soon have to decide why 10-year-old Lisa, who suffered from a painful condition that was not life-threatening, died in her hospital bed a few hours after being admitted. 

The hospital acknowledged at the inquest that it ``failed the Shores as an institution.'' 

For almost an hour yesterday, Gomberg berated the hospital for embarking on ``a campaign of deception, confusion and outright corruption of the truth. 

``I am not suggesting that anyone set out to kill Lisa or that anything sinister was done to cause her death,'' he added. 

``I am suggesting that there was a callous disregard for protocol and procedure, and an almost inconceivable disregard of prompts, any of which, if reacted to, would have saved Lisa.'' 

Gomberg asked the jurors to find that nurses Ruth Doerksen and Anagaile Soriano ``were not very concerned about Lisa,'' when she was admitted the evening of Oct. 21. 

He went on to suggest that sometime between 6:30 a.m. and 7 a.m. on Oct. 22, 1998, Doerksen discovered a doctor's orders for monitoring Lisa against possibly deadly effects of morphine - orders she had failed to access - and went into Lisa's room, where she found the little girl dead. 

Gomberg suggested Doerksen then grabbed a corometric monitor (a device that sounds an alarm if respiration or heartbeats fall below set levels), put it on a shelf in Lisa's room, then ran out and did rounds with the doctors who found Lisa dead. 

``Nurse Doerksen couldn't have saved Lisa at 6:45 a.m. or at 6:55 a.m. or at 7:05 a.m., but she could save her career, and that's exactly what she tried to do,'' he added. 

It was a suggestion Gomberg made earlier in the inquest while questioning Doerksen. At the time, she replied ``Mr. Gomberg, you can suggest anything you want.'' 

Hospital lawyer Patrick Hawkins, who argued in his closing address that Lisa was the victim of ``honest human mistakes,'' said that Gomberg had delivered ``innuendo, suspicions and allegations,'' but that there was no evidence to support his claims. 

``It is offensive and demeaning to suggest that they (the nurses) would do something like this,'' he said. 

``Unless we get into the absurd, there is no suggestion that they were all participating in some cover-up.'' 

Hawkins asked the jurors not to be distracted by accusations and the ``theatrics of lawyers,'' and he blamed the media for making things worse. 

He also asked the jurors not to focus solely on the nurses, who have acknowledged their errors, but to look at the conduct of everyone involved in Lisa's care, including doctors, who he said did not do enough to make sure the nurses were aware of their orders. 

Hawkins acknowledged that it was months before the hospital's investigation of Lisa's death got on track, and that the hospital had not preserved important equipment and documents for the coroner. 

He said this was because there were so few unexpected deaths at the hospital that ``no one knew the procedures, and everyone thought that someone else was handling it.'' 

Yesterday, Gomberg also referred to a question put to Sharon Shore in cross-examination by Hawkins, who had asked Shore whether she was related to Gomberg. 

``In March, 1999, my brother married Sharon's first cousin. I was asked to get involved with this case by Sharon's father, Phil Grief, immediately after Lisa died,'' he explained. 

``I don't think Sharon and Bill are relatives, but I'd love it if they were,'' Gomberg continued. ``They pursued the truth with integrity, great courage and tenacity.'' 

The jury is expected to begin its deliberations later today.