What would you do if everything you knew was crumbling down around you? In this first episode of RNZ Podcast, Only Human, find out about an invisible disability that took musician Penni Bousfield on a path to re-learn everything she had ever known.

"You might have heard reports of sudden deafness syndrome where someone has a bad cold and they wake up the next morning and they can't walk and they can't hear properly."

"That was what happened to me," says Penni Bousfield who features in the first episode of RNZ's freshly launched podcast, Only Human - a series of unexpected, raw personal portraits.

Bousfield is one of 6 percent of the population with otosclerosis.

For some sufferers, otosclerosis can run in the family, while for others there is no known reason for the onset of hearing loss.

A musician for most of her life, Bousfield began experiencing hearing difficulties in her left ear when she was in her early twenties. By her forties she started wearing a hearing aid.

Otosclerosis is one of the few forms of hearing loss that can be rectified with surgery, so the decision to undergo a stapedectomy had the potential to dramatically improve her hearing.

"My middle ear was steadily getting worse and I thought it was worth it," Bousfield says of the operation.

But three days following the procedure, Bousfield says every possible thing that could go wrong went wrong.

She experienced a constant whooshing feeling in her head, which lasted several months, along with head rushes and severe loss of balance. Basic everyday tasks were difficult and she needed a walking stick to assist her.

"The first week or two I was totally in denial ," she says.

But while the surgery threw her physically off balance, her inability to tackle normal everyday activities also sent her into a downward spiral of depression.

Bousfield's hearing loss was an invisible disability that affected her work opportunities, but also her social life.

"I can't differentiate between reflected sound, echoes reverberation and direct sound," says Bousfield.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

"I was frantically running down to the river and digging trenches…" says Lucie Levesque who was stuck in the remote wilderness in north central British Columbia when an underground fire began surrounding her wooden cabin and no one was there to rescue her.

If you were asked to ditch your cell phone, social media, the latest news and even contact with friends and family for the adventure of a lifetime, would you do it?

Avid-adventurer Lucie Levesque launches into a life changing experience in this episode of Only Human - a podcast about the human experience in its raw, and sometimes unexpected form.

Today, the idea of going 'off grid' and taking a breather from the multidimensional online 'connected' world that we live in seems like a distant and unattainable dream. But for Lucie Levesque, being stuck in an isolated no-man's land offered the chance to learn more about herself and bring her closer to nature.

Often described as the life of the party, Levesque jumped at the chance to do a three month stint living and working out of a remote lodge in the Spatsizi Plateau in north-central British Columbia.

The plateau is so isolated that goods can only be brought in via float plane and there is no running water or electricity. The only sign of civilization is an 8-day trek by horseback on a dirt road.

Blogs and travel articles describe the Spatsizi terrain as a kind of brutal face-off with nature - a place that tests the limits of the human capacity to survive.

With very minimal human interaction is wasn't long before Lucie began losing her ability to speak, followed swiftly by a sequence of challenging and life-threatening events that nothing could ever prepare her for.

"One day I was by myself with the horses and there was a grizzly bear rubbing his back near my little cabin," says Levesque who simply froze on the spot.

What happened next is almost beyond belief...

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In this episode of Only Human we meet Antonia, formerly Anthony John Pearce. As a young man, Anthony was a handsome singer-songwriter who had no shortage of female attention. Except one day everything changed.

"I've dyed my white hair. At home I don't have to wear a wig," says Antonia Pearce from a cafe in Auckland's bustling suburb of Ponsonby.

In this episode of Only Human we meet Antonia, formerly Anthony John Pearce.

Antonia Joanna Pearce has the kind of legs that many women would envy and while she towers above most women, she isn't afraid to don a pair of heels.

Now in her early seventies, Pearce loves to shop. She has a wardrobe bursting at the seams and a collection of around 16 wigs - one to suit every outfit and mood. You could say, she's a girl's girl. And when she gets together with her friends, she chats and giggles about guys.

But things haven't always been so rosy for Pearce.

It was almost a decade ago that she made the transition away from her former life as Anthony John Pearce.

As a young man, 'Anthony' was a handsome singer-songwriter who had no shortage of female attention. He was married and has children. He played guitar, he was a boat builder...he did the kinds of things that would make him just one of the guys.

Except one day everything changed. Pearce was in her fifties when she went through a kind of male menopause, otherwise known as Andropause - a change in male hormones.

It was devastating and came as a complete shock - one that was physically and mentally overwhelming.

"Men don't talk about it," she says as she flicks through a file of old black and white family photographs, including one of her as a school boy.

When the hormone changes started happening, 'Anthony' experienced a dramatic loss of libido, which eventually led to more feminine tendencies.

"It's quite traumatic," says Pearce who wrote a play called Testostrogen, based around these experiences.

"I was not a macho man ever...I was always a heterosexual male."

Eventually the physical changes led to a decision to transition from male to female, which has altered family relationships. She has also become accustomed to sideways glances from passersby, but the biggest surprise and one she never anticipated, was being attracted to men.

"I know people look at me and say, 'you're a man dressed as a woman,' even though I don't look too bad," says Pearce.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details