Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 30, 1993 TAG: 9308300106
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TED ANTHONY ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: READING, PA. LENGTH: Medium
\ From adjacent chairs to carefully considered decisions, most things come in pairs at the home of sisters Lori and Dori Schappell.
The 31-year-old twins see movies together, dine together and consult each other constantly. They have to: The sisters are joined at the head. Fate has forced them to get along in a way few siblings must.
One works a daily job, the other is an aspiring country singer. They share an apartment, a quick sense of humor and a life of perpetual companionship.
Compromise, they say, is their salvation - their way of squeezing two sets of agendas and ambitions into one day's time.
"We are two people with two lives. We're not just one person with two heads," says Lori Schappell, who works in a hospital linen department.
The Schappells, known technically as craniopagus conjoined twins, are the rarest form of Siamese twins (a term they hate).
They have separate brains and bodies but share skull bone, tissue and blood vessels that bond Lori's upper left temple with Dori's. They face opposite directions and can see each other's face only in mirrors. In conversations, they rotate their bodies so the one talking faces the visitor.
Dori has spina bifida and at 4-feet-11 is 4 inches shorter than Lori. When Lori walks, Dori rolls along on a stool.
Together, the two are making their own way on Lori's salary. It pays for a 15th-floor apartment in a senior citizens' high-rise with medical care nearby.
Their chairs and stools are arranged in twos, but portraits feature one twin at a time, each posing while a backdrop masks the other from camera view.
"We have minds of our own," Dori says, and both laugh at the literal meaning they lend to the figurative saying.
The twins say they followed the separation surgery in Philadelphia 10 days ago that sacrificed 7-week-old Amy Lakeberg so her sister, Angela, could receive their shared heart.
The technology available is "astounding," the Schappells say, far beyond what was available when their mother rejected surgery that would have separated them.
"They probably could separate us now, but it would be a very long ordeal - they'd have to separate our bones," Dori says. "Besides, if you thought the Lakebergs were expensive, you ain't seen nothing. It'd be as high as the national deficit if they tried to separate us."
Neither twin has ever known a moment's privacy or isolation, but neither seems particularly bothered.
"That's our life," Lori says. "We just don't imagine life apart because it's not something we'll ever see."
Lori favors unobtrusive fashions; the more flamboyant Dori wears Western garb and cowboy boots. While Lori works at the hospital, Dori reads; in turn, Lori accompanies Dori on country-music trips.
"Look at me," said Dori. "Five days a week, 8 1/2 hours a day, I have to go somewhere I don't like. But it gets the rent paid and puts the food on the table. So I do it. I have to."
They say they have separate sets of friends and date occasionally. Lori says she wants children, while Dori does not.
Doctors classify conjoined twins by their point of linkage. Most, 73 percent, are connected at the chest or upper abdomen. Twins joined at the head represent only 4 percent of conjoined births, according to The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where the Lakebergs were separated.
The most famous unseparated twins who lived to adulthood were Chang and Eng Bunker, who were joined at the hip. Although their heritage was mostly Chinese, they were dubbed Siamese twins by carnival showman P.T. Barnum.
The Bunkers married sisters and fathered a total of 22 children before dying in 1874 at age 63 - two hours apart.
"When you look back on Chang and Eng, they lived separate identities," Lori says. "They both had wives and kids and homes, and respectfully shared time - half in one house and half in the other.
"We're like any couple, but we're sisters," she added.
The Schappells say emphatically they have no desire to be separated, even if it could be done: "I don't want to waste time thinking about something that's not going to be, that could have been," said Dori. "I'd rather be living."
by CNB