Charity Tillemann-Dick: Singing For Her Life (with someone else's lungs).
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 19 February 2018
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Charity Tillemann-Dick grew up in Denver, CO, with her 10 brothers and sisters. She loved to sing from her earliest memories, so she did the logical thing; graduated high school 3 years early, sped through college...and became a political operative by her late teens! What?!
All the while, though, she continued to sing on the side, until Charity was eventually "discovered" by a legendary opera teacher, who took her under her wing and gave her a full-ride to study at the legendary Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, Hungary. In an instant, everything changed, a new career was born. Charity became a sought-after soprano and top-selling classical recording artist, performing all over the world.
But, something was wrong. Her lungs, the very source not just of her life, but of her vocation, began to fail. Diagnosed with potentially fatal pulmonary hypertension, she had two double lung transplants, the second coming after the first pair of lungs was rejected. Still, each time, she found a way not just to sing again, but to come alive, and also become an evangelist for transplants and medical research. Her story is detailed in her memoir, The Encore. We explore this, journey, along with a beautiful love story, her relationship with faith and so much more along the way.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I went to see a top specialist here in New York actually, who I didn't realize how well-intentioned |
| 0:09.1 | she was, which she was, but she told me I have to stop singing, but the high notes were |
| 0:14.9 | going to kill me. |
| 0:16.4 | But there was nothing in the medical literature that backed up any sort of connection between |
| 0:22.7 | singing or arias and pulmonary hypertension. |
| 0:26.7 | And it made me happy if I was only going to live a few more years or months because I |
| 0:32.2 | was diagnosed with a stage 4 case. |
| 0:36.1 | I was going to be happy, gosh darn it. |
| 0:37.7 | I was going to do what I loved and I was not going to be ripped violently from this thing |
| 0:42.9 | that I had dreamed of doing my whole life. |
| 0:49.2 | Charity at Telemondick grew up the middle child of 11 children in her family in Denver. |
| 0:57.2 | When she was 5 years old, her older sister took her to a local opera performance and she |
| 1:03.4 | was transported swept away, something changed inside of her and she also knew that she |
| 1:09.7 | didn't just want to listen. |
| 1:11.5 | She wanted to become somebody who could create this that brought her deeper and deeper into |
| 1:16.6 | music and eventually becoming a student of music through some quirks of circumstance and |
| 1:24.6 | maybe the universe guiding her in different ways. |
| 1:26.8 | She found herself studying in her the late part of her teens in Hungary and then beginning |
| 1:32.6 | to perform all over Europe until a profound moment that rocked her world, rocked her |
| 1:38.6 | health and would forever change her life. |
| 1:41.1 | She realized she was struggling deeply with her health at the same time that her career |
| 1:46.0 | seemed to be skyrocketing and discovered that she had something called pulmonary hypertension. |
... |
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