“Charity’s middle name is Sunshine,” Wrede said. She possesses, in the words of longtime family friend Tedra Wrede of Hillsborough, an “extra measure of joyousness.” But Charity, the fourth, was and remains a unique bundle of cheerfulness and resilience. “We’re not big on fear in my family,” said Tillemann-Dick, noting that when she worried about her skeletal appearance after the first transplant, her grandmother told her, “Darling, when everyone got out of the concentration camps, they were so skinny and they gained weight in no time.”Ĭharity’s mother, Annette Tillemann-Dick, gave birth to 11 children and home schooled all of them. That she seems almost no worse for the wear has something to do with the fact that her grandfather was Tom Lantos, the 14-term Peninsula congressman who along with his wife, Annette, survived the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Hungary - and that her mother (Annette) inherited her parents’ tenacious spirit. She spent a total of three months in a coma and during surgery she has flat-lined - twice. She’s endured many medical challenges, including having the blood drained from her body and pumped back in. The rare and incurable disease causes the lining of the lungs to thicken, putting a fatal strain on the heart. Tillemann-Dick has clung desperately to life since she was diagnosed in 2004 with idiopathic pulmonary hypertension. 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.
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. But as she lay in a hospital on life support, another pair became available. The new lungs failed the following year, and so she said goodbye to her family and prepared for the end. She had no choice - without a lung transplant in 2009 she would have died. “I wasn’t really enthusiastic about giving them up.”
“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.
No one wants to have her lungs cut out of her chest, but for a budding opera singer, the surgery provokes an added layer of dread.