Laughing at My Nightmare Read Online Free PDF Page A

you want to name him?” they asked me, forgetting that by this point in my life, sarcasm and humor were already deeply ingrained into my personality.
    “Sauerkraut!” I said with a nonchalance that drove both of them into hysterics, earning us some rude glances from other parents of sick children in the large hospital room.

    It’s a tough call, but I think I’m just a little cuter. Andrew and me.
    Several months later, I beamed with pride as I held Andrew “Sauerkraut” Burcaw in my arms for the first time. I was immediately more in love with him than my tiny little mind could even comprehend. He was my little brother, and I was going to teach him everything I knew about everything. He was going to be amazing at sports, and I was going to teach him about them. He was going to play video games with me. We were going to be best friends. I was perfectly confident in all of this, and I turned out to be right.
I should mention that everything I know about the process of my diagnosis and early childhood is completely based on the stories my parents have told me. Like everyone else, I have little memory of the first few years of my life. There’s a chance that they are lying to me and I do not have SMA. Maybe one of them accidentally dropped me down a flight of stairs as an infant, and they decided it would be easier to create this elaborate story than own up to their failures as parents. My entire life could be a hoax. The Illuminati are possibly, if not definitely, involved (Do you think my book will sell more copies now that I can include Illuminati as a keyword for the Amazon listing?). I will never know.

chapter 8
    andrew is a dead man
    “How do you remain so positive?”
    People ask me this a lot. The origins of my positive nature can be attributed to learning to handle adversity as a young kid. My whole family will tell you that I was always a happy child, constantly looking for the next source of entertainment, never allowing my wheelchair to get in the way of having fun. Still, I’m human and humans get upset sometimes, especially during childhood.
    The earliest memory I have of feeling completely devastated and overwhelmed with negative emotions took place when I was probably six or seven years old. One of my favorite things to do as a child was play Nintendo 64. Whenever my best friend and I weren’t outside playing cops and robbers, we were sitting in my living room with our minds completely absorbed in a game of Banjo-Kazooie. Can we all just agree that Gruntilda is the worst?
    Anyway, if my memory serves me correctly, there was a particular day during the summer when my best friend was away, so I spent most of the day playing Nintendo 64 by myself. I played a bunch of games besides Banjo-Kazooie, such as GoldenEye 007 (which I was never very good at because I couldn’t reach the button that was used to fire your gun and that turned out to be a pretty crucial aspect of the game), Mario 64, and Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (God, I was so lame).
    Whatever game I was playing I remember being totally immersed in the storyline when my brother came into the room. Andrew was only three or four at the time, and his favorite thing to do back then was annoy me. Actually, that’s still one of his favorite things. I don’t remember why, but baby Andrew had a pair of scissors that day, and as soon as he saw how far along in the game I was, he decided it would be funny to pretend to cut the wire that went from the controller to the game console. I screamed at him to stop as he taunted me; I’d never gotten this far in the game and I was fairly confident that if he accidentally snipped the controller wire, it would destroy not only my Nintendo, but also all of the electricity in our house and maybe even the world.
    Needless to say I became frantic and enraged as he continued to pretend to cut the wire. Then, in what I still consider to be one of the most traumatic experiences of my life, pretend snipping became