Charity Tillemann-Dick: Singing For Her Life (with someone else's lungs).

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• 00:03

  I went to see a top specialist here in New York, actually, who I didn't realize how well intentioned she was, which she was, but she told me I had to stop singing, that the high notes were going to kill me, that there was nothing in the medical literature that backed up any sort of connection between singing or arias and pulmonary hypertension.

• 00:26

  And it made me happy.

• 00:28

  If I was only going to live a few more years or months because I was diagnosed with a stage four case, I was going to be happy, gosh darn it, I was going to do what I loved and I was not going to be ripped violently from this thing that I had dreamed of doing my whole life.

• 00:48

  Charity Tillamon Dick grew up the middle child of eleven children in her family in Denver.

• 00:57

  When she was five years old, her older sister took her to a local opera performance and she was transported, swept away.

• 01:05

  Something changed inside of her and she also knew that she didn't just want to listen.

• 01:11

  She wanted to become somebody who could create this.

• 01:14

  That brought her deeper and deeper into music and eventually becoming a student of music.

• 01:21

  Through some quirks of circumstance and maybe the university guiding her in different ways, she found herself studying the late part of her teens in Hungary and then beginning to perform all over Europe, until a profound moment that rocked her world, rocked her health and would forever change her life.

• 01:40

  She realized she was struggling deeply with her health at the same time that her career seemed to be skyrocketing and discovered that she had something called pulmonary hypertension.

• 01:51

  That eventually led to a double lung transplant, which took her back into the career, but also again failed and led to yet a second.

• 02:01

  In today's conversation, we dive into this journey.

• 02:05

  She has detailed it beautifully in a new book called the Encore.

• 02:08

  We touched down in some of the major moments, both the early awakenings, some of the struggles moments that kind of rocked her world, opened her eyes, challenged every fiber of her being to rise, and also delivered moments of grace and awakening and love and connection.

• 02:27

  I'm Jonathan Fields and this is good life project.

• 02:34

  You went to college very young as well?

• 02:36

  Yeah, I was a baby.

• 02:38

  I started college when I was 14 and there was a little jesuit school down the street and my other siblings had started college young.

• 02:47

  But I think I did feel this need to prove myself in big families.

• 02:53

  Oftentimes you're clumped together in sort of mini families within the family.

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