Nurse shut off breathing alarm

Testifies at inquest into 10-year-old's death

Ruth Doerksen, a Ryerson diploma nursing graduate who'd worked at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children for 10 years, testified she switched off a breathing alarm measuring apnea -- pauses between breaths -- hours before Lisa died, since it had beeped three times in 10 minutes.

But Doerksen couldn't explain why a heartrate alarm -- which she swore she attached to Lisa -- did not sound.

Lisa died on Sick Kids' orthopedic ward just after 7 a.m. on Oct 22, 1998, after getting a combination of morphine and three other drugs -- two given earlier at home.

She had been given emergency care at the Sick Kids the previous night for acute leg pain caused by a rare, chronic condition known as reflex sympathetic dystrophy.

Doerksen insisted Lisa's heart monitor was attached and turned on when she checked at 6 a.m. -- but she found it turned off shortly after Lisa died.

Asked by coroner's counsel Margaret Browne if any nurse accidentally switched off the heartrate monitor, Doerksen replied: "No. You can't inadvertently turn off this monitor."

Lisa's mom, Sharon, had been asleep in the hospital room beside Lisa that night. She and husband Bill and their lawyer Frank Gomberg were angered by Doerksen's testimony.

"I want to see if (Doerksen) has the courage to say my client turned it off," Gomberg said outside the inquest. "Did the machine turn itself off?"

"My testimony next week will be that there was no monitor attached to Lisa and no alarm went off in that room," Sharon Shore told a reporter.

The inquest continues today.