AN 82-year-old man has overcome profound deafness and legal blindness to rediscover the joy of storytelling, proving it’s never too late to rewrite your life.
For Geoff Hillier, life has been a journey of challenges, resilience and rediscovery.
Geoff’s career as an engineer took him across Australia and the world, but years of working in noisy industrial environments left him profoundly deaf.
By 2007, macular degeneration claimed his right eye, and shortly after, his left eye began to deteriorate.
Declared legally blind, Geoff’s world shrank as he lost his ability to work and drive.
“I was lost in a dark space where I could not read and now found communication difficult,” he said.
“Before losing sight, I used to lip read, but now I cannot see lips and cannot even see faces when I look directly at people.”
For years, Geoff struggled to adapt to his dual disabilities, and the joy of reading had slipped away.
“I tried audio books with headphones, but it was not a good experience,” he said.
“However I persisted, I could still do gardening, ride my bike, do volunteer work and to many people I appeared as normal.”
A breakthrough came when he was fitted with a cochlear implant just before the pandemic.
“To start, everything sounded like Donald Duck,” Geoff recalled. “But one day I woke up and went into the garden and suddenly I heard the bird songs.”
His hearing comprehension leapt from 30% to 95%, giving him what he describes as a “second chance”.
Encouraged by his wife, Rosemary, Geoff joined the University of the Third Age (U3A) Writing for Pleasure group.
“I was so surprised at the help from the group, the encouragement, that I found myself re-joining society,” he said.
Today, Geoff is revising his novel, a remarkable 75,000-word achievement he crafted with screen readers and adaptive technology.
“I now know and sympathise with the many seniors that have the hidden disabilities of hearing and sight, and try to help others to understand hearing loss and those that cannot see properly,” he said.
“I hope that my double whammy of deafness and blindness is one that the few that experience it and survive will understand living as normal as possible can be a life changer.”
