June is Deafblind Awareness Month and we finish off the month with Penny Leclair.

This week on Outlook she speaks to us about resilience and accepting the inevitability of change in one’s life.

We learn about her experiences, being born blind and losing her hearing over time. She tells us about her journey with hearing aids, cochlear implants, two hand manual, and interveners.

Penny has never let the things others have told her she couldn’t do be her limits. She wanted to be a mother, she wanted to try online dating later in life, and her advocacy to spread the word across Canada on the necessity of interveners for deafblind Canadians motivates her to speak out.

June is also the month Helen Keller was born and to think of all she did, before most of what is available in these times was even an option. That didn’t stop Keller and nothing stops Penny Leclair from living a full life with a mission to improve services for Canadians who live with a whole new disability, not only blindness and not only deafness.

Check out this week’s episode to hear the story of the first time Penny heard birds and rain and CBC radio after years of increased isolation.

Intervener services must increase for people in every province and territory because it’s truly an essential service if ever there was one.