When shaken babies grow up
Michele Poole's twin granddaughters no longer match. One is healthy and smart; the other is broken.
BY CHRISTINE _EVANS Cox News Service
How to describe Michele Poole's life? Perhaps this: The other day, she headed home from summer vacation in North Carolina, lodging herself behind the wheel of a 40-foot motor home and driving straight through for 746 miles and 16 hours - with six dogs, one cat, four rescued kittens, her mother, her twin daughters, one twin's friend, the other twin's nanny and the nanny's cousin.

THOMAS CORDY/COX NEWS SERVICE Michele Poole (right) is the chairwoman of the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome. She is raising her twin teenage granddaughters, Gabbi and Shell. Gabbi (left) is confined to a wheelchair after being shaken as an infant by her father.

There were more people, and more animals, plus eight weeks' worth of diapers and some major extra equipment (a wheelchair lift, bathing table and portable shower) in the SUV and trailer that rode along, caravan style, but at this point, who's counting?

"Everything went perfectly smoothly," she says, "until the air conditioning froze up and tripped the circuit breaker, and it got to be about 100 degrees in there.

"But please don't make me sound like a crazy lady.

"There's a reason my life is like this."

Flash back 13 years. Two infants. Twins. Gabriela Sabrina and Michele Marie.

One day, their father, George Poole, was in charge of the babies while his wife went to her job at a Walgreens. George and Monica were a young couple trying to make it. For years, George - Michele Poole's son from her first marriage - had been in and out of trouble, small stuff, drug-related, but now that he was a dad, he was trying to straighten up. This day, though, Nov. 19, 1994, would turn out to be the worst of his life - and not just his.

In a plea deal, the fuzzy outline of his story tumbled out: George stays home with the twins. He has a temper. Gabbi cries. Louder, until she's wailing. God, he has never heard a sound like that before. So he picks her up ... and ... he shakes her.

Five seconds or 10. Who knows. It was enough.

"Cerebral contusions," the doctor's report said. "Shaken Baby Syndrome."

That is why Michele Poole and her husband, Rod, are now the legal parents of two growing girls who ought to be their grandchildren. That's why Michele, at 57, has devoted the better part of a decade to lecturing on the perils of shaking a baby. That's why she needs a giant motor home and a backup band of loyal helpers (not to mention a husband who changes diapers) to accommodate all of Gabbi's needs.

That is why Gabbi is Gabbi. Not like other twins "Come on in," Michele Poole says.

She always says that.

Her big house in the woods on the western edge of Palm Beach County, is a lot like her life, chaotic at first glance, but on second, mystifyingly efficient.

In the 1970s, she and Rod opened North Ridge Electric in Pompano Beach and although they were not the most likely candidates for success - he had a ninth-grade education, she a few years of computer college - the business prospered.

It is a hot Sunday, a few weeks before the twins' 13th birthday, and the girls are in their rooms, doing what they do - which is not at all the same thing, not like other fraternal twins of the same gender.

Gabbi's room is bright yellow, a delicate marriage of normal little-girl things - 122 stuffed animals at last count - and a variety of technical contraptions to make her life easier and more interesting: a specially outfitted bathroom, a sea of ceramic tropical fish rigged from the high ceiling, the lift, the shower table, the wheelchair that tips back when Michele inserts a tube into Gabbi's stomach and pours in the green liquid that looks like cactus juice. Her food.

Some days, Gabbi watches TV, usually Baby Einstein, but "watches" is perhaps too strong a word because she can see only peripherally, and only vague shapes and colors, and her wheelchair must be positioned just so because her right eye works better than her left.

By Gabbi's starfish-patterned pillow, Michele keeps a red MP3 player, which she switches on to stimulate Gabbi (Motown) or to soothe her (Mozart). Gabbi has feelings and moods, and her parents and twin and nanny all try to detect what they are on a nearly round-the-clock basis. This can be difficult, though, because Gabbi can't talk. Or stand. Or reach. Or point.

Or, really, think.

"It's just killing me," Michele says. "Because for a while, she was doing a lot of stuff. She would say 'oww' for out, and she could make a hand sign for potty. The other thing is she would put her head down in kind of a drop, and we thought that meant 'no.'

"Now, with the drugs, we've lost all that. A few years ago, she began having seizures, really violent ones, day and night, and the only drugs that helped her also slowed her down. So it's a trade-off."

Next door to Gabbi's yellow room is Little Michele's hot-pink one, an appropriately unruly teenage haven decorated with a half-dozen unpacked camp suitcases waiting for some action on the part of their owner.

Peek at the bookshelf, and you will understand more deeply the difference between Little Michele - who these days prefers the more grown-up "Shell," thank you - and her twin, Gabbidoodle.

Shell devours "Gossip Girl" and "The Clique" books and has delved into James Patterson.

Gabbi likes "Curious George" and "Jungle Picture Pops."

Of course, she can't read them or even turn the pages.

Shell tiptoes in after she has finished her homework and does that for her.

"Most of my friends already know about Gabbi," Shell says.

What she means is, she doesn't have to do a lot of explaining.

The first time Michele Poole was written about in the newspaper, it was 1999, and she had just begun what would become a national crusade to educate people about SBS, Shaken Baby Syndrome.

She did the research, memorized the stats - hundreds of American babies are shaken each year; about a quarter die - and then she took an egg and a bowl into living rooms and banquet halls, and she broke the egg against the bowl and sloshed the yolk around, and then she said:

"This is what happens to a baby's brain when you shake her."

This is why Gabbi is Gabbi.

That got people's attention. And because she's not a woman who is shy on the phone - "Hello, this is Michele Poole. When can you fit me in?" - she made hundreds of calls and packed up her van and headed off to every parenting group, medical conference and chicken dinner that would have her, and ... she brought Gabbi.

"I hate to say she was a prop, but she was a prop."

She would lay Gabbi down on a table so everybody could see her, and she would talk about what Gabbi could and couldn't do. The first list was quite short, the second way too long.

If Little Michele was available, she brought her, too, for comparison's sake.

"This is what Gabbi should be like," she'd tell her audience, smoothing Little Michele's curls. She never cried during her speeches, just after.

"You know what I'd really like to do?" she said, eight years ago, to the reporter who was following her around.

At the time, she was addicted to Dunkin' Donuts' decaf and had just finished giving an impromptu lecture to a roomful of customers waiting on their crullers.

"I'd like to visit the National Center out in Utah. That's the premier group. Their whole focus is getting the word out that you shouldn't shake a baby.

"I just want to present myself and show them I'm a quality person and not a bag lady or anything. I want to tell them, 'Here I am. I can help.'

"They don't want to put their name behind somebody who's not presentable and organized."

In 2003, she joined the board of the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome.

Today, she is its chairwoman. A bittersweet birthday The twins turned 13 earlier this month.

Bittersweet.

How could it not be? With one twin flourishing, fun, smart, a bit shy, a moody just-teen who drives her dad crazy with her iPod - "maybe one day," Rod says with a wink, "she'll take the ear buds out" - and yet can turn in a five-chapter science fair report on the intricacies of powering a solar car.

And then, Gabbi. Sweet, porcelain-skinned and broken. "We don't really know what's going on in there," Michele says, tapping Gabbi's temple.

"Something like this," Michele Poole says, "does not ever end.

"Ever."