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Life can change with the strength to overcome addiction, the courage to travel through life alone, the conviction to make the world a better place, or the determination to succeed on your own terms.

Jennie Brand-Miller, 54, is a professor of human nutrition at the University of Sydney and co-author of The Low GI Diet series of books. As a teenager she discovered she had a hearing problem, which worsened as she got older, but her life changed when she had a cochlear implant.

“As far as anyone knew, I had normal hearing when I was a child. It wasn’t until one day when I was a teenager and had friends over that one of them said, ‘Your mother’s calling you’, and I thought, ‘Well, if she’s calling me why can’t I hear her?’. I said something to my parents and they got my hearing tested. It was found that my hearing was not as good as it should be. In fact, it was bad enough for the doctors to say that I should have a hearing aid.

“As far as anyone knew, I had normal hearing when I was a child. It wasn’t until one day when I was a teenager and had friends over that one of them said, ‘Your mother’s calling you’, and I thought, ‘Well, if she’s calling me why can’t I hear her?’. I said something to my parents and they got my hearing tested. It was found that my hearing was not as good as it should be. In fact, it was bad enough for the doctors to say that I should have a hearing aid.
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“I was thirteen or fourteen at the time and just completely rejected the hearing aid. I had one and I think I wrapped it up in a tissue and somehow it got thrown out – that happened a couple of times – my poor parents!

“I went through university knowing I was saying ‘I beg your pardon’ a lot – my friends used to tease me about it in a nice way. By the time I finished my PhD and was offered a job lecturing at the University of Sydney, I knew I had to do something about my hearing so I got two very strong hearing aids. But the ear, nose and throat specialist I went to told me: “You’re in the wrong job; you shouldn’t be doing it.” He made it really clear that I should get out of my job because of my hearing problem. I personally couldn’t have imagined a better job – it was in nutrition, teaching what I loved, and I was really looking forward to doing it. His words were really hurtful and they sort of played on my mind for the next twenty or thirty years; that I wasn’t good enough for the job I loved.

“I knew I wasn’t hearing my students’ questions as well as a normal hearing person would. I told people I was hearing impaired and asked them to speak up. As time went on though, I had to ask my students to write their questions down on paper and send them up to the front.

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