Sharon Shore admits she made a "terrible" mistake but says it shouldn't stop her from practising law.

Yesterday, Shore began what's expected to be several days of testimony at an admissions hearing held by the Law Society of Upper Canada.

The big question before the hearing's three-person panel is Shore's character — specifically, whether her decision to withhold a three-page neurologist's note from a prosecutor, after criminal charges were laid against two Toronto nurses following the 1998 death of her 10-year-old daughter Lisa, casts enough doubt on her character to disqualify her from practising law.

Yesterday, Shore, 50, took full responsibility for her actions.

"It was a terrible mistake and it never should have happened," she said. "I still have trouble believing I did something like that, but I did and I have to live with that."

Shore and her lawyers argued that while the circumstances surrounding Lisa's death may have clouded her judgement at the time, her actions don't erase a lifetime of good character.

Shore's lawyer, Benjamin Zarnett, brought up his client's "unblemished" employment and academic history, calling her a "model of integrity and candour."

Zarnett also cited instances in which others have been accepted by the law society despite dubious pasts, ranging from prior perjury convictions to sexual assaults.

"This is a far more compelling case for admission than any of those," Zarnett said.

Lisa Shore broke her leg in a school yard accident on Feb. 11, 1998. She visited the Hospital for Sick Children two days later, the first of several visits over the next nine months because the toes poking out of her full-leg cast seemed to be changing colour. Lisa's leg was re-cast and the pain subsided.

But less than two weeks later, Shore said Lisa woke up, "screaming in pain" and was rushed back to the Hospital for Sick Children, where she was in and out through most of March and April of 1998. Shore said the doctors told her Lisa's pain was "in her head."

Wanting a second opinion, the Shores found a hospital in Boston, where doctors diagnosed Lisa with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome, a neurological disorder where the pain from an injury, often a broken bone, remains after the injury has healed.

From all accounts, Lisa's pain was under control for most of the summer of 1998. She went to day camp all summer and "had her life back," Shore said.

Lisa's pain returned in late September 1998 after she apparently over-exerted herself at school during a Terry Fox run. Shore said she called Sick Kids in Toronto, but was told the soonest they could see Lisa was Oct. 9.

So, the Shores drove Lisa to Boston for treatment.

During Lisa's three separate outpatient visits in late September and early October, she met with a neurologist. At the hearing, Shore described the neurologist as "brusque" and "discourteous."

The Shores returned to Toronto, but on Oct. 21, Lisa was once again admitted to the Hospital for Sick Children when her pain intensified.

Emotion choked the volume from Shore's voice yesterday as she talked about the last day of her daughter's life. Shore had spent the night in her daughter's hospital room, but awoke to a frenzy of doctors and nurses trying to revive Lisa. Shore recounted how Lisa died unexpectedly on Oct. 22, 1998 after being administered morphine.

"And she was gone," Shore said.

Shore said an autopsy failed to reveal the cause of Lisa's death. Wanting an explanation, Shore wrote to the Children's Hospital in Boston requesting records from Lisa's last visit in September and October of 1998 and received eight pages, including the three from the neurologist.

Shore said she didn't think the neurologist's report accurately reflected Lisa's medical condition, so she threw it away.

At a coroner's inquest, launched in November 1999, the jury deemed the 10-year-old's death a homicide. Charges of criminal negligence were laid in October 2001 against two nurses at the Hospital for Sick Children, Ruth Doerksen and Anagaile Soriano.

Assistant Crown attorney Hank Goody asked Shore for all of Lisa's medical records from the Boston hospital during the proceedings. Shore requested and received the records and turned them over to Goody — without the neurologist's note. "I can't answer to you why I did it," Shore told the panel.

But she said the guilt of her decision weighed on her, gnawing away until she finally "came clean" and admitted her mistake of not providing the neurologist's records to Goody or to the detective investigating whether the two nurses were criminally culpable in Lisa's death.

In her April 2003 witness statement, Shore said, "I wanted to protect Lisa because nobody cared. So I threw that doctor's report out. That's it."

The criminal charges against the two nurses were withdrawn in May 2003, partly because Shore failed to hand over the neurologist's report.

At the College of Nurses of Ontario, the two nurses each pleaded guilty to a single count of professional misconduct related to Lisa's care and received one-month suspensions.

The hearing continued today and is expected to last most of the week.