plug question

I am currently experiencing a problem where MEL can see connections that my plugin cannot.

for example, in mel if I do

connectionInfo -sfd headHandle.translateX;

I will get the proper response of:
headHandle_translateX.output

If I try this in the plugin:
Plug plug = fnDagNode.findPlug(plugName, &status);

where I have verified that fnDagNode is indeed "headHandle",

when I call:
plug.isConnected(), it returns a false.

Any ideas as to why I would be seeing this behavior?