check GC PAD for connection?

Is there some technique or trick to using the PAD functions given to us to determine if a controller is connected in a particular slot?

It seems PAD_ScanPads() just scans them all, and looking through pad.c i see the variable in the struct i'd like to use (.err = PAD_ERR_NONE) but I cant come up with a way to access and check against it. Does PAD_ScanPads() return something I can use?

I've been trying to come up with a creative way to check but have come up fruitless...any ideas or tips on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Wasn't there a PAD_Read function or something?

There is but i can't access the pad structs that PAD_Init() creates....correct me if im wrong but it all seems as though its "done under the hood" so people only have to ScanPads.

I guess you can use
u32 PAD_Read(PADStatus *status);

PAD_ERR_NONE value and PADStatus struct is defined in pad.h...

If you look closely to the below function in pad.c it's used as such...
u32 PAD_ScanPads()