Squirmy and Grubs

Disabled people and their partners watch Shane Burcaw and Hannah Burcaw's videos to find models for caregiving, intimacy, and public explanation when cultural scripts treat disability as incompatible with romance.

ENABLE Model location

• Navigator-side Compensations → Use Humans for Assistance
• Navigator-side Compensations → Submit Feedback to Creators
• Navigator-side Compensations → Endure Inaccessibility

What it is

Shane Burcaw and Hannah Aylward Burcaw run Squirmy and Grubs, a YouTube channel they started in June 2018 to document daily life as an interabled married couple.¹ Shane lives with spinal muscular atrophy and uses a power wheelchair, and Hannah provides most of his daily personal care, from eating and dressing to transfers and positioning.² The Burcaws publish videos about travel, medical appointments, household routines, intimacy, and public reactions, which turns their channel into a visible record of the human-help relation that interabled couples carry every day.

Shane's earlier disability writing, his nonprofit work with Laughing at My Nightmare, and the couple's growing audience led Macmillan's Roaring Brook Press to publish their book Interabled on January 14, 2025, as a collection of interviews with other interabled couples interwoven with the Burcaws' own story.³⁴ NBC hired Shane as a writers' room consultant on Ordinary Joe, which put a disabled creator at the requirement-setting stage where scripts and casting decisions shape what audiences learn about disability before a show reaches viewers.⁵

The Burcaws use the channel as a give-feedback loop back to mass media because they answer audience comments, media requests, and social assumptions directly on camera instead of letting those assumptions sit unchallenged.¹⁶ That directness makes the channel a peer reference point for viewers whose hospitals, relatives, schools, and employers read interabled marriages as nursing arrangements or pity stories.

Why it matters

Television networks gave disabled characters to non-disabled actors most of the time for most of the medium's history. The Ruderman Family Foundation's 2016 white paper found that 95 percent of characters with disabilities on top network shows were played by non-disabled performers.⁷ The Ruderman and Geena Davis Institute report covering 2016 to 2023 found that disabled characters still made up only 3.9 percent of scripted television characters and that roughly 20 to 22 percent of those characters were authentically cast.⁸ Squirmy and Grubs enters that inherited arrangement because it gives disabled people and their partners a way to publish a different account without asking a network programmer to approve it first.

Strangers, relatives, and clinicians still treat interabled caregiving as evidence that romance cannot survive disability.¹⁶ Hannah has described being mistaken for Shane's sister or nurse in hospitals, airports, and restaurants, and Shane has documented the stream of comments accusing Hannah of martyrdom or accusing Shane of exploiting her.²⁶ The Burcaws answer that pressure in public, which leaves people in similar relationships less alone when they have to endure inaccessibility in waiting rooms, at family gatherings, and in comment sections that question the relationship itself. The burden of correction still falls on the couple and on viewers who borrow their language, but the channel gives those viewers a phrase, a posture, and a reference point that institutions have refused to supply.

Books, speaking fees, brand partnerships, and channel production fund most of the Burcaws' public work, while entertainment companies keep hiring non-disabled actors for disabled roles and then treat that casting as ordinary.⁴⁵⁸ When a disabled creator has to build an audience, write books, and consult on a network show to get basic disability accuracy into a writers' room, the market has already pushed the cost of correction onto the person most affected by the error. Shane and Hannah carry the adaptation tax that studios, showrunners, and streaming platforms have refused to pay at the requirement-setting stage, where provisioning a disabled writer, a disability consultant, or a casting budget for disabled actors would cost less than the decades of corrective labor disabled creators keep performing in public.

Stella Young named the pattern that keeps turning disabled lives into motivational content for non-disabled audiences "inspiration porn," and she argued that the device "objectifies disabled people for the benefit of non-disabled people."⁹ Mia Mingus offered a different frame in her 2011 essay on access intimacy, describing it as "that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else 'gets' your access needs" and "the way your body relaxes and opens up with someone when all your access needs are being met."¹⁰ Sins Invalid's 10 Principles of Disability Justice names interdependence as a core commitment and treats access as a collective responsibility rather than a private failure.¹¹ Alison Kafer's Feminist, Queer, Crip pushes against the curative imaginary that reads disabled life as a problem to be cured or pitied, and argues for cripping the future so that disabled intimacy does not have to justify itself.¹² Squirmy and Grubs sits inside that intellectual tradition because the channel refuses the cure frame, shows care as a two-way relationship, and treats disability as part of the couple's life rather than the obstacle to it. When the Burcaws film Hannah helping Shane eat or transfer, they make the access intimacy Mingus named legible to viewers who had been taught to see only tragedy or heroism.

Family caregivers of people with spinal muscular atrophy carry measurable health costs when public systems underfund personal assistance. Landfeldt and colleagues' 2023 systematic review in PharmacoEconomics found that SMA caregivers experience reduced health-related quality of life, elevated rates of depression and anxiety, physical strain, sleep disruption, and significant financial impact, with primary caregivers (most often mothers and spouses) carrying the heaviest load.¹³ The arrangement that produces this embodiment starts with Medicaid home and community-based services waivers that cap personal care hours, reimburse direct support professionals at poverty wages, and push unpaid family members into the gap.¹⁴ Hannah's labor and Shane's care needs play out inside that gap, which is why the Burcaws keep naming care work on camera instead of hiding it. The channel does not erase the biosocial cost of American long-term care policy, but it refuses the silence that concentrates that cost inside the family and out of public view.

Entertainment companies and streaming platforms now face a frontier in whether they change the hiring and writing practices that keep reproducing the disability tropes Young and Kafer described.⁸⁹¹² Squirmy and Grubs gives viewers a counterexample and a vocabulary, and Interabled widens that audience through a major publisher, but the larger screen economy still controls casting, writers' rooms, and the jobs that set disability representation before viewers ever open YouTube. The channel reaches the people who look for it. The frontier remains the structural one: making disabled romance ordinary enough in mainstream production that interabled couples no longer need to run a second media operation out of their living room to be recognized as a marriage.

Real-world examples

In the news

In 'Interabled,' YouTube stars Squirmy and Grubs tell stories of love and disability (February 2025)
-- Robin Young, WBUR / NPR Here & Now

• Young interviewed the Burcaws about Interabled and about the misconceptions they keep correcting in public, including the assumption that Hannah is Shane's nurse rather than his spouse.¹⁵ The interview itself is an instance of give-feedback to mainstream media because the Burcaws use the platform to push back against the scripts their audience keeps encountering.

In the news

YouTubers 'Squirmy and Grubs' confront misconceptions by sharing stories of interabled couples (August 2025)
-- MPR News

• Minnesota Public Radio framed the book around the couple's correction work, which makes visible the cultural human-help labor disabled people and their partners perform when mainstream media keeps misreading their relationships.¹⁶

In the news

Love, Humor, and Real Life: Shane & Hannah Burcaw on Relationships and Disability (January 2026)
-- Easterseals, Everything You Know About Disability Is Wrong

• Easterseals hosts Lily Steinberg and Erin Hawley interviewed the Burcaws about how public assumptions about love, worth, and caregiving show up in their comment sections, and about how a single viral interview shifted the channel from casual vlogs into a platform for sustained disability conversation.¹⁷

In the news

The State of Disability Representation on Television: An Analysis of Scripted TV Series from 2016 to 2023 (2024)
-- Ruderman Family Foundation and Geena Davis Institute

• The Ruderman and Geena Davis Institute researchers documented that disabled characters remain about 3.9 percent of scripted television characters and that only a fifth of those characters are authentically cast.⁸ That data frames why so many viewers find a YouTube channel more truthful about interabled life than any primetime drama.

• Macmillan's Roaring Brook Press published Interabled on January 14, 2025, presenting 22 interviews with interabled couples interspersed with the Burcaws' own story and treating disabled intimacy as a subject for trade publishing rather than niche advocacy.³⁴

• NBC hired Shane as a writers' room consultant on Ordinary Joe, and the Burcaws appeared together on screen in the episode he helped shape, which placed disabled creators in both the writers' room and in front of the camera at the same time.⁵

• Publishers Weekly called Interabled "a sophisticated and necessary compilation that sheds light on the normalcy of interabled romance," indicating how trade reviewers positioned the book against the cultural scripts the Burcaws set out to disrupt.¹⁸

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Care at the requirement-setting and content stages of media production involves writers, producers, and editors who build from disabled people's expertise before the camera rolls:

• "We hired a disability consultant who lives with this condition, and their notes shaped the script before casting began."
• "We asked disabled creators to review the caregiving scenes, not only the diagnosis scene."
• "We wrote the interabled relationship as a relationship, not as a lesson about pity or inspiration."
• "We budgeted for accessibility advising and disabled hiring from the start of development."
• "We watched Squirmy and Grubs during prep because we needed to see how interabled care actually looks and sounds."

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Neglect at the requirement-setting and content stages keeps media aligned with stale stereotypes:

• "We cast the best actor, regardless of whether they actually live with the disability."
• "Our audience needs a simplified disability story."
• "We can skip the caregiving scenes because they slow the plot down."
• "The consultant said it was fine, so we do not need anyone else with that disability in the room."
• "We will add authenticity later if the show gets renewed."

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)

Compensation describes the labor disabled people and their partners carry when entertainment media and social scripts leave them without accurate models:

• "I spent years thinking needing help meant I could not be a real partner."
• "Every time a nurse calls my spouse my caregiver, I have to explain our marriage again."
• "I could not find anything on television that showed a wheelchair user with a husband or wife who looked like my own."
• "I share the Burcaws with my family because I do not have another reference they will watch."
• "The channel does not stop the comments, but it gives me language for them."

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All observations occur within disability media representation and interabled caregiving relationships in the United States, where family members carry most personal-care labor under Medicaid home and community-based services waiver programs.

Footnotes

1. Squirmy and Grubs, "How Did Squirmy and Grubs Meet? About Us!" squirmyandgrubs.com/more-about-squirmy-and-grubs. ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. TODAY, "'Squirmy and Grubs,' YouTubers who highlight dating with disabilities, are married," today.com/health/squirmy-grubs-youtubers-who-highlight-dating-disabilities-are-married-t191194. ↩ ↩²

3. Macmillan, Interabled: True Stories About Love and Disability from Squirmy & Grubs and Other Interabled Couples, Roaring Brook Press, January 14, 2025, us.macmillan.com/books/9781250620712/interabled. ↩ ↩²

4. Publishers Weekly, review of Interabled: True Stories About Love and Disability from Squirmy & Grubs and Other Interabled Couples, publishersweekly.com/9781250620712. ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. TV Insider, "'Ordinary Joe': Shane & Hannah Burcaw on Their Big TV Cameo," tvinsider.com/1028168/ordinary-joe-squirmy-grubs-shane-hannah-burcaw-cameo/. ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. BraunAbility, "Squirmy and Grubs: Interabled Relationships and Ableism," braunability.com/us/en/community/the-driving-force/squirmy-grubs-interabled-relationships-ableism.html. ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. Kristina Kopić and Jay Ruderman, "The Ruderman White Paper on the Employment of Actors with Disabilities in Television," Ruderman Family Foundation, 2016, rudermanfoundation.org/white_papers/the-ruderman-white-paper-on-the-challenge-to-create-more-authentic-disability-casting-and-representation-on-tv/. ↩

8. Ruderman Family Foundation and Geena Davis Institute, "The State of Disability Representation on Television: An Analysis of Scripted TV Series from 2016 to 2023," rudermanfoundation.org/white_papers/the-state-of-disability-representation-on-television-an-analysis-of-scripted-tv-series-from-2016-to-2023/. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

9. Stella Young, "I'm not your inspiration, thank you very much," TED, April 2014, ted.com/talks/stella_young_i_m_not_your_inspiration_thank_you_very_much. ↩ ↩²

10. Mia Mingus, "Access Intimacy: The Missing Link," Leaving Evidence, May 5, 2011, leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/. ↩

11. Sins Invalid, "10 Principles of Disability Justice," 2015, sinsinvalid.org/10-principles-of-disability-justice. ↩

12. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). ↩ ↩²

13. Erik Landfeldt et al., "Caregiver Burden of Spinal Muscular Atrophy: A Systematic Review," PharmacoEconomics 41, no. 3 (2023): 275-293, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36515815/. ↩

14. Kaiser Family Foundation, "Medicaid Home and Community-Based Services: People Served and Spending During COVID-19," kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/medicaid-home-community-based-services-people-served-and-spending-during-covid-19. ↩

15. Robin Young, "In 'Interabled,' YouTube stars Squirmy and Grubs tell stories of love and disability," WBUR / NPR Here & Now, February 17, 2025, wbur.org/hereandnow/2025/02/17/interabled-squirmy-and-grubs. ↩

16. MPR News, "YouTubers 'Squirmy and Grubs' confront misconceptions by sharing stories of interabled couples," August 6, 2025, mprnews.org/episode/2025/08/06/youtubers-squirmy-and-grubs-confront-misconceptions-by-sharing-stories-of-interabled-couples. ↩

17. Easterseals, "Episode 50: Love, Humor, and Real Life: Shane & Hannah Burcaw on Relationships and Disability," Everything You Know About Disability Is Wrong, January 2026, easterseals.com/explore-resources/resources-library/podcast/everything-you-know-about-disability-wrong/episode-50. ↩

18. Publishers Weekly, review of Interabled, publishersweekly.com/9781250620712. ↩