"I had spent my whole life training my lungs," Charity Sunshine Tillemann-Dick told a rapt audience of health care advocates this week in San Francisco. "I wasn't really enthusiastic about giving them up."
She had no choice — without a lung transplant in 2009 she would have died. The new lungs failed the following year, and so she said goodbye to her family and prepared for the end. But as she lay in a hospital on life support, another pair became available.
On Tuesday afternoon, Tillemann-Dick breathed deep using her third set of lungs and, her voice strong and clear, poured out a soaring aria from Charles Gounod's "Romeo and Juliet," delighting several hundred members of a Case Managers Society of America conference at the Moscone Center. While it wasn't exactly Lincoln Center — where she debuted in 2011 — it marked a significant milestone: her first major performance following the second transplant in January. (Ed note: this subject is of great interest to our readers, even though it is not about choral music per se.)
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.