With a quietly inspirational style, Nancy Burns shares her poignant life experiences as a blind woman with the hope of educating and enlightening others about certain societal misconceptions and attitudes regarding those who are disabled. Beginning with the moment when she woke up in the hospital—both eyes bandaged—and realized she would not receive the emotional comfort and guidance she so desperately needed, Burns offers a compelling glimpse into the fulfilling world she created for herself, despite her disability. Her personal story chronicles her struggles as a young girl learning to live with her vision loss, her family’s inability to acknowledge her disability, and her determined journey to acquire the skills that led her to eventually become a vocational counselor who worked with disabled clients.

In Once Upon a Challenge: Hearing is Believing Burns offers an important message—the way one chooses to live with challenges becomes the key to success in life.

With a quietly inspirational style, Nancy Burns shares her poignant life experiences as a blind woman with the hope of educating and enlightening others about certain societal misconceptions and attitudes regarding those who are disabled. Beginning with the moment when she woke up in the hospital—both eyes bandaged—and realized she would not receive the emotional comfort and guidance she so desperately needed, Burns offers a compelling glimpse into the fulfilling world she created for herself, despite her disability. Her personal story chronicles her struggles as a young girl learning to live with her vision loss, her family’s inability to acknowledge her disability, and her determined journey to acquire the skills that led her to eventually become a vocational counselor who worked with disabled clients.

In Once Upon a Challenge: Hearing is Believing Burns offers an important message—the way one chooses to live with challenges becomes the key to success in life.

In putting this narrative together, one very real issue I struggled with was how to deal with the present climate of political correctness. My decision was to tell the stories as I remember them, in the language as I remember. To do differently would change and compromise the actual experience. Thus, this is a sharing of feelings and experiences that a coach and his athletes spent in timeless hours in a gym practicing and competing, of thousands of miles traveled throughout the United States and beyond, and days and nights spent together in laughter and frustration.

In putting this narrative together, one very real issue I struggled with was how to deal with the present climate of political correctness. My decision was to tell the stories as I remember them, in the language as I remember. To do differently would change and compromise the actual experience. Thus, this is a sharing of feelings and experiences that a coach and his athletes spent in timeless hours in a gym practicing and competing, of thousands of miles traveled throughout the United States and beyond, and days and nights spent together in laughter and frustration.