Strangers Called Her His Nurse. His Sister. His Mother. She Is His Wife.

Shane Burcaw has spinal muscular atrophy type 2: severe muscle weakness, a powered wheelchair, help with dressing, eating, transfers. Hannah Aylward watched a documentary about him in 2016. The jokes stuck. She emailed. They were about a thousand miles apart. Messages, FaceTime, then a meeting, then a relationship that outsiders kept misfiling. Caregiver. Sister. Paid companion. Fake. A woman trapped. They started a camera instead of arguing in comments. The YouTube channel Squirmy and Grubs is travel, fights, sex, ramps that fail, and the unremarkable fact that one spouse lifts the other out of a chair. They call it a partnership, not a sacrifice with a wedding ring.

They married September 4, 2020, in a backyard. The officiant was on Zoom because of the pandemic. Millions have watched since. In 2025 they published Interabled, their own story and other couples’ — one partner disabled, one not — against the idea that attraction and equality cannot share a house with a wheelchair. Disability shapes their days. They have never claimed it does not. What they film is the part strangers refuse to grant: that she chose him, he chose her, and the person holding the fork is not the whole marriage.

Sources

• The New York Times on Interabled and the couple (January 2025)
• PEOPLE and TODAY coverage of the September 4, 2020 wedding
• Squirmy and Grubs YouTube channel (marriage videos and channel bios)
• Evoke and later profiles of the book and advocacy work