if "message" is protected, how do I retrieve SOAP response called "message"? - php

Question

I'm really stuck on this one. At the bottom of this post, I've attached the API documentation I'm working with. I want to catch the "message" when the response ("ask") isn't "Success". Seems reasonable enough, right? But when I do something like:
sfcSendError('Something went wrong. This is the message from the API: ' . $result->message);
I get a fatal error:
PHP Fatal error: Cannot access protected property SoapFault::$message
I found this seemingly related question on SO, so I tried changing "message" to "getMessage()" but (no surprise) that results in a different fatal error about calling an undefined function.
Here's my code snippet:
$client = mySoapClient(MODULE_SHIPPING_SFC_API_URL);
if (!$client) {
sfcSendError('could not make a SOAP connection. Halting until next CRON. [' . __FILE__ . ':' . __LINE__ . ']', 'SOAP Failure in cron job');
exit; //halt and wait for the next time cron runs
} else {
$HeaderRequest = array(
'customerId' => MODULE_SHIPPING_SFC_ACCOUNT,
'appToken' => MODULE_SHIPPING_SFC_TOKEN,
'appKey' => MODULE_SHIPPING_SFC_KEY
);
$reg = array(
'HeaderRequest' => $HeaderRequest,
'detailLevel' => 1,
'ordersCode' => $_query->fields['sfc_ordersCode']
);
$result = $client->getOrderByCode($reg);
if ($result->ask != "Success") {
sfcSendError('Something went wrong. This is the message from SFC: ' . $result->message, 'SOAP Failure in cron job');
$_query->MoveNext();
continue;
}
}
This is the referenced function:
function mySoapClient($url)
{
try {
$client = #new SoapClient($url, array(
'trace' => 1,
'exceptions' => 0,
'encoding' => 'UTF-8'
));
} catch (SoapFault $e) {
return 0;
}
return $client;
}
What am I doing wrong? Or is this a "bug" with the API where they really shouldn't be using "message" in their response?