A HALF-DOZEN or so of the usual suspects, plainly the worse for wear after another night like all the nights before, had convened the customary drunkards' parliament around a recuperative bottle yesterday morning beside the Hospital for Sick Children's parking garage.

For the down and out, it appeared to be blithe, if bleary, business as usual at Elizabeth and Elm Sts. 

It may have been the only aspect of life thereabouts that was. 

It could have been no normal day, after all, for anyone needing or working at a hospital when ranks of newspaper boxes at the entrances screamed of a ``homicide'' therein, when the victim was a relatively healthy 10-year-old girl, when it took the determined effort of the girl's parents and a coroner's inquest to extract the dreadful facts. 

In October, 1998, Lisa Shore was brought to Sick Kids by her mother because of pain in her leg, which had been broken earlier that year. The girl was admitted and attached to a morphine pump. And less than 12 hours later, as her mother dozed beside her, Lisa was found dead. 

Even parents who have stood those awful vigils - leaning over a child to check again and again for the sweet, soft breath, bolting upright, terrified, from dazed half-sleep at the beeping of IV monitors - even those who have in the wee hours feared the worst must be hard-pressed to imagine the horror of it coming true. 

After their daughter's death, the Shore family could get no satisfactory answers from the hospital as to what had gone wrong. It took a coroner's inquest the Shores fought for to find that Lisa was not monitored, that doctors' orders were not even read, much less followed by nurses, and that what occurred in the wake of her death - lost evidence, notes withheld - amounted to a cover-up. 

``A jury of five lay people heard the evidence presented and said there were bad things going on,'' Lisa's mother Sharon Shore said yesterday. 

``The nurses didn't follow the orders, they didn't even look at the orders. They didn't check Lisa properly. They couldn't see signs of medical emergency when it was right in front of them.'' 

It was a verdict that - however valid the finding may be, however necessary it is that more questions be asked, however understandable a mother's anger - made for demoralization palpable in the air at Sick Children's yesterday. 

Worry was surely added to worry for families already enduring the most distressful of times; pressure surely added to pressure for staff who, as anyone who has needed a hospital lately knows, already work in a system sorely stretched. 

What the day was, was nothing so much as one just to be got through. 

In the admissions lobby, there are banners with teddy bears and striped balls and bugles, murals of days at the beach with sun and surf and sandcastles, mannequins wearing funny hats, binoculars and butterfly nets. 

What hope had they, however, in providing comfort against newspapers that screamed homicide? 

By the fountain of the Terrace Court, at the foot of the glass-walled elevators, coffee after endless coffee is consumed by those with weary faces and faraway eyes. 

Through the lobby passed parents clutching stuffed toys. Others pushed wheelchairs bearing their children while IV poles were awkwardly manoeuvred alongside. By a window, a volunteer from the women's auxiliary leaned and chatted with a little girl with a big eyepatch sitting in a wheelchair. 

And every one of those adults passed by those newspaper boxes. 

At the lobby pay phones, a young woman filed reports. 

``She doesn't know yet,'' she told someone. 

At the best of times, everything is provisional in the demi-world of hospital waiting. This makes it worse. 

It is not uncommon - minds so frequently elsewhere - to see the strange, inconclusive conversational dances of the distracted. And how much worse were they today? 

``Should we go out for lunch?'' a man asked his partner. 

``Whatever you like.'' 

``We could just get a bite here.'' 

``If you want.'' 

``It doesn't matter to me.'' 

This day, they stayed. 

In the lobby, a couple sits together, she sleeping, her head on his left shoulder; he with arm around her, his eyes in another place. 

A little boy in a gray sweatsuit is given coins by his mother to hurl into the fountain, his laughter a counterpoint to prevailing quiet. 

And a little before 11 a.m., things go as they are meant to, as they usually do, as a blue-jeaned boy on crutches slowly makes his way out of the hospital and back to the world, his beaming parents holding the doors open for him. 

Then a man walks slowly through the lobby reading a paper, those headlines screaming. Homicide. 

Over by the admitting desk, there are questionnaires which can be filled out by patients' families and mailed in to the Hospital for Sick Children. 

``How are we doing?'' the forms ask. 

The answer yesterday was probably this: About as well as could be expected.