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Shane Burcaw's Laughing At My Nightmare

647 Words3 Pages

In a world where walking, eating, showering, and using the restroom are everyday, mindless tasks, people often forget that there are people who struggle with these things. Shane Burcaw’s autobiography, Laughing at My Nightmare, allows readers to truly understand what it is like to have a debilitating disability. Burcaw’s “nightmare” is a neuromuscular disease called spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), which affects approximately .0001 percent of all people (Burcaw 13). To put it simply, spinal muscular atrophy causes the body to have poor development of muscles, and progressive muscle deterioration over time. This is due to a lack of a protein that is essential in helping to create and maintain muscle tissue. Sufferers of SMA have bodies that …show more content…

After graduating high school, he attended Moravian College in his hometown of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he studied English and started a blog that quickly began gaining popularity. Burcaw went on to write as a freelancer for a newspaper called The Morning Call, and continued to post on his blog after college. To go along with his book, Shane also has a website titled Laughing at My Nightmare. He uses this as a tool to share his life as a disabled person, and to promote his non-profit organization whose goal is “to spread a message of positivity while providing equipment grants to those living with muscular dystrophy.” Even though Shane has faced many challenges in his life, he has never chosen to give up. Shane’s success and determination is truly inspirational. In America today, there is a lot of social discrimination towards people with disabilities. Many people have lower expectations for disabled people and assume that they are helpless, which is simply not true. These institutionalized barriers have led to less than 36% of disabled higher schoolers obtaining a diploma, and an even smaller number of students moving on to college. Shane Burcaw is a great example of a disabled person finding their place in life, and becoming a successful member of

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