Opera Singer Thrives After Double Lung Transplant

Oct. 27, 2010— -- Opera singer Charity Tillemann-Dick, 26, took the stage Tuesday to open this year's TEDMED conference in San Diego with an exquisitely sung aria.

The conference, an event that examines novel approaches to medicine and healthcare, marks an important anniversary for the singer -- a year ago to the day she awoke from a month-long coma following a difficult double lung transplant.

At age 20, Tillemann-Dick was just starting her singing career in Europe when she was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension, a condition in which the arteries supplying the lungs have unusually high blood pressure, putting patients at risk for heart failure.

"I saw a specialist and she told me that I had to stop singing, that those high notes were going to kill me," the soprano said at Tuesday's conference. "She was emphatic: I was singing my own obituary."

But Tillemann-Dick did not give up singing and even when her condition worsened and she had to carry around a 4-pound apparatus that delivered medicine to her continually just to be able to function, she managed to perform all over the globe.

"She just wasn't going to let [her condition] rule her life," the singer's mother, Annette Tillemann-Dick says.

After her father died suddenly however, her condition worsened, as did her voice. When the singer had right heart failure due to her worsening symptoms, she finally gave in to her doctor's advice and agreed to a double-lung transplant.

Singer Gets New Set of Pipes

Given that opera singing focuses heavily on proper breathing technique, Tillemann-Dick was less than floored when the impossible happened: a donor from Texas was available as a match within days of her agreeing to undergo the procedure.

"I had spent my entire life training my lungs. I wasn't enthusiastic about giving them up," she says. She asked her surgeon at the Cleveland clinic, Dr. Ken McCurry, to please try to save her voice. Knowing that the breathing tubes put in place after her surgery would no doubt destroy her voice, while still in a post-operative coma, surgeons performed a special procedure to reroute the tubes to preserve a slim chance that Tillemann-Dick might perform again.