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

Episode Date: February 19, 2018

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.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. And it made me happy. If I was only going to live a few more years or months because I was diagnosed with a stage 4 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. Charity Tilleman-Dick grew up the middle child of 11 children in her family in Denver. When she was five years old, her older sister took her to a local opera performance, and she was transported, swept away. Something changed inside of her, and she also knew that she didn't just want to listen. She wanted to become somebody who could create this. That brought her deeper and deeper into music, and eventually becoming a student of music. Through some quirks of circumstance, and maybe the universe guiding

her in different ways, she found herself studying in 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. 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 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. In today's conversation, we dive into this journey. She has detailed it beautifully in a new book called The Encore.

We touch 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. I'm Jonathan Fields me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him.

Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. You went to college very young as well. Yeah, I was a baby.

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. But I think I did feel this need to prove myself. In big families, oftentimes, you're clumped together in sort of mini families within the family. And I was the baby of the first clump. And so I'm a number four or five, depending on how you count it. And I really just felt compelled to show that I was as smart and able as my siblings. And so I took the requisite tests and I enrolled in university nearby. And I took it very seriously.

What are your parents thinking at the age of 14? You're like, I'm ready for college. They did not think I was. They did not think I was. They did not think I was. And they said, oh, Charity, that's great. But I really think my mother, my mother who's amazing, but she said, I really think that you should just start at a regular age, which made me feel even more

like they thought less of me than my siblings. And that was what really made me feel, you see, I'm a contrarian. That evidenced itself later in my life too. But when she said that, I really felt that I needed to start college. And so I started studying very intensely and intensely for the tests. I'd been working as a journalist for Reuters in the year before. They had a teen news bureau, and I got hooked into that by a friend of a friend and my writing was pretty good. And so I felt like this was something I could take on. It was harder at that point than anything I had done, but I found it a relief once I got to

college that I didn't have to worry about boys, that I didn't have to worry about socializing, that I could just focus on what I was there for, which was to learn. And that focus evidenced itself in my grades and in the other things that I did. I think my classmates probably thought I was crazy. I'd come to school in like my khakis and my little loafers and a blazer with a briefcase. One time I went up to, I was very involved in student life. And one of the things I wanted to do was they didn't have a music major. And I wanted to make sure that was established. And so I was waiting outside the office of the Dean of Student Life who had heard there were young students wandering around campus. And I was the young student wandering around campus. And I looked a little older than

my age. And there was a professor in there going off about these younger students that he had heard about. This is terrible. This is supposed to be a safe place, not a place where the other kids are worried about molesting a girl on campus, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It brings down the experience of everyone. And as he left the office, he pointed to me and he said, this is exactly who this hurts. And he walked away because he didn't even know who I was, but it sparked some controversy that I was there. But yeah, it was a wonderful experience. I loved Jesuit education. I became very close to my priests, the president of the university. And he became almost like a second father to me.

But yeah, I studied politics and economics. And we established a music major by the time I left the school and a minor as a precursor to that major. So I did graduate with a music minor. And then I went to work on political campaigns. Yeah, right. So it's like straight into politics after that. Was there a thought of trying to make music the center thing? Or in your

mind, it's like, that was something that you loved, but it wasn't necessarily your path. So it was something I loved, but I didn't feel like it had been something I had been able to study seriously enough to have as a vocation. And so it also wasn't practical. And I knew that. And coming from a big family where my parents were very much dreamers, you hear about inventors like Steve Wozniak. You don't hear about the tinkers who pepper our country and who create incredible things every day, but aren't particularly successful inventors. And my father, while brilliant, didn't have much business sense, and he fell into that category. And so practicality, especially at that point in my life,

seemed very important. So I thought I would go to law school and become a lawyer and go down that track. And I was so sad working on campaigns and I didn't know why. And at one point I started singing so we could get into rest homes. People were sick of politics in New Hampshire. And so I asked one of the event coordinators for the senior center if I sang a few arias, if they'd let our candidate in to speak. And they said, well, I guess we could make that work. And when I was done, there was this terrific little old lady who took my face in her hands. And she said, why is a girl with such a pretty voice in such a dirty business? And I really, I didn't think that politics was a dirty business. I still, despite everything that's happened, I don't. I just think they're honest about what goes on and politics play a major role in everything we do, whether

it's business or entertainment or academia, or even as students, politics play a big role. And so I think at least they tell you what's going on there. So you don't wonder, you know, why was I passed over for this? Why didn't this happen? It's politics. You know, it's politics. But after about six months of campaigns, I knew I would hate myself if I didn't at least try my hand at music. And then as I jumped into my father's city council campaign to manage the first part of that,

and then they brought in another campaign manager for the runoff. In the midst of that, I really knew that it was going to be my last campaign, at least for a while. I needed music in my life. I think everyone has relationships like that. Sometimes they're romantic, where there's this turning point where they realize, no, this thing or this person is actually essential to who I am and what I'm going to do and where I'm going to go. And so the campaigns were a turning point in my life. Yeah. How did you make that transition?

What was the... So I applied to a number of music schools, but I applied late because I didn't decide until, I guess I applied to Curtis and to Peabody. Which, and Curtis takes like one or two people a year. Yeah. And so I got the nicest rejection letter I'd ever received. And they're like, because I made it to their final callback. And they're like, we thought one of our color

tours was graduating, but she's not. And we don't have space for another one because they're very selective about how they accept singers. I had made a vow to myself not to go into debt if I was going to study music. And so that's why Curtis, because even if you go to the best conservatories in the world, it is mighty hard to pay off those loans unless you marry a banker. Curtis is free, right? Yes, that's right. That's right. And I think there are now the graduate programs at Yale are free.

I think the graduate programs at Juilliard now might be free. And then there's, I think, is it Colburn in California is free, but they do more musical theater than they do opera. And so I applied to Peabody late and I got in, but they were out of money because if you apply after their first entry period, they tell you that there aren't scholarships left. And so that was that. And then I applied to the University of Denver also late, but they have a bigger endowment to pull from and they gave me a full scholarship. So even though I wasn't too happy about it, even though they have a great program, a great program, I just didn't want to be in Denver anymore, especially after losing a campaign. It hurts. I was going to go to Denver, but then I went to my grandfather's 75th birthday party,

and I thought I was going to a voice lesson. And it's funny because they were speaking Hungarian in the voice lesson. And my family came to the United States via Hungary, where we'd been for many hundreds of years on my mother's side. And it was funny because even though the teacher was speaking Hungarian in the lesson, I instinctively knew what she was saying. Singing is very physical. My Hungarian teacher used to say, oi, I'm sport. It's like a sport. And it is.

And so she would give me all of these physical prompts. And I knew what to do. And then she left for a moment and she told me to sit. This was in Hungary? This is in Budapest at the Opera House. And she brought in this line of distinguished looking people and they all sat down and she told me to sing what I had just sung again. And when I was done, the most distinguished looking of the people stood up and she said, you will join us at the Loose Academy of Music this fall. And they had full funding for me. And so I stayed put. I was like wearing capri pants till November when I got the rest of my clothes. But yeah, it was an

incredible year. So it kind of came out of nowhere, completely unplanned. Yeah, you know, it's funny because I had been preparing for it on the one hand for a very long time, and then it just happened. I think it's a theme in my life that I do all of this preparation. I face a great deal of failure in the path that I think I am supposed to take. And then these incredible opportunities come out of nowhere and change my life over and over and over again, whether it's in love or in my career now with public speaking or with writing or, you know, on down the list. It's interesting how sometimes we don't anticipate where opportunity will come from. The universe works in strange ways sometimes. That's right. So you start down this

path and you spend then your time finally training, you know, like officially full-time in there, doing this thing that you've yearned to do and you like devote all of your energy to actually learning and training your voice. Yes. Jonathan, it was so traumatic because I was there with kids who had studied for, you know, many of them 12, 14 years. I was the youngest person in the program by about seven years at the time. Because the voice, it should be like a fine wine. It gets better with age. And if you train it too early, you burn out.

And it's a problem that we have in the United States because we throw these kids into undergraduate programs in opera. And they, bless their hearts, have no idea what their voices are going to turn into. And they start singing repertoire that's too big. And it trashes their voice later on. And they also don't have the right sound for big stages oftentimes. But I'm younger than my fellow students, and I'm feeling this weight of responsibility to my vocal cords and everything else that they tell me all the time. Like, if you sing repertoire that's too heavy, you'll kill your voice.

And I'm learning a new language, and I felt so out of place until exams. It's essentially the midterm exam where they have everyone get on stage and sing five to six art songs and arias. And then they bring everyone into a room and they give you your evaluations in public. And they dismissed six singers from the program while we sat there. And these kids, they were all extraordinarily good. My teacher only had, at Peabody, which is no slouch conservatory, my teacher had 30 students in the entire program in Budapest. I think there were 37 students and we had 12 teachers. And so every teacher only had a couple of students

who they poured everything into their connections, their experience, their technique. It was a real apprenticeship. And so as, you know, the student before me was dismissed from the program, and I was holding my breath because I knew I just had so far to go. But I had a benefit, which was I was the only coloratura there. And, you know, coloraturas have these very high, very agile voices. The Queen of the Night, which is a very famous aria, is a coloratura role. Violeta in La Traviata, there is a lot of coloratura singing in that role. Gilda, a lot of roles in the Bel Canto repertoire in particular are coloratura roles. And I had a

very high, very agile coloratura voice. And so I'm sitting there preparing myself to be dismissed. And they loved me. And I was so happy. It was like this moment of reckoning where everything went my way. And I was so relieved. But at the same time, my body was, it felt like it was falling apart. And I thought I was crazy. And I would go to bed every night and I would hear my heart's valves snapping open and closed. And I thought it was just anxiety. But I'd also get extremely winded doing almost anything from standing up to running for a train. I started having these painting spells. They actually started in Denver. And I had two when I was dancing and one when I ran to catch a tram. And it was this strange dichotomy where everything in my life seemed to be going better than I had planned, but where my body seemed to be falling apart. And I don't know. It's funny how that happens. What happened that made you realize that something bigger was going on that needed to be addressed?

Well, this gets into charity crazy zone, and you can zone out if you want to. But my mother went to divinity school and she's very much, I would consider her very much like a Mormon mystic, if that makes sense. I think that if we would have been brought up as Jews, that me and my mom would have been like way into Kabbalah, like way into Kabbalah. But there, she always taught me that like, if you have a problem, that you can pray and receive answers. And that's a very strong tradition in Mormonism. You know, Joseph Smith, we believe he prayed and he received this very vivid vision of what he was supposed to do. And I have had many very vivid experiences in my spiritual life. And then this was one of them, but I had had one of these fainting spells and I came home.

It was a Valentine's Day dance. I was dancing with the Dishiest Boy. He was so handsome. And I fainted while we were dancing. We were both very good swing dancers. And I just got carried away and I thought it would be romantic to faint into the arms of the handsome man. It is not romantic at all, in case anybody is wondering. But I was really concerned and I got home and I said this prayer and I pleaded with God. I said, you know, please, if I'm okay, please just let me have some sense of peace because I am freaking out right now. This does not feel normal. And I felt this pit in my stomach and I opened my scriptures to the book of Kings just randomly. That was how my mom taught me to do it. You sort of let the scriptures fall

over. It's sort of like a non-pagan version of a Ouija board. And it told the story of this king who had wanted to win a war, and he promises to sacrifice whatever he sees. And if he wins this war, he opens his eyes, or whatever he sees first, and he opens his eyes, and his virginal, lovely daughter comes in the room, who is his favorite child, just as he opens his eyes. And so it's this horrible story of virgin sacrifice. And she's given like three months to go mourn her virginity. And, you know, I'm a very religious person. And I was very much a virginal, you know, 19-year-old at the time. And I just about like lost it. I called my mom and I told her what had happened. And I don't think she took it quite as seriously at the time, but she asked me if I wanted to come

home. I didn't. I was very happy where I was. I loved being in Budapest. I had wonderful friends. I was making wonderful music. I loved my teachers and I loved my school. She said, okay, well, be careful, go see a doctor. And I think on the side, she made sure that everything was in line with my insurance, just in case something was wrong. And I went to see a doctor and they told me that I had really low blood pressure, which I did. It runs in my family and that I needed to eat more caffeine. They told me to drink coffee and I told them I didn't do that. And they said, well, then eat dark chocolate, which was fine with me and eat more salt, which salty food's delicious. So that was also fine. Little did I know that at least the second directive was extremely dangerous for me at the time. And I didn't have any morphine thing spells

for the rest of the year, but I think it was mostly because I really moderated my physical activity. I stopped going to the tram because it was up a very, very shallow incline, and going up hills was very difficult for me. So I would walk to the bus where I couldn't see the bus stop, so I wouldn't speed up. I couldn't see the bus stop until I rounded the speed up. I couldn't see the bus stop till I rounded the corner so I wouldn't know if I missed the bus or not. And it didn't matter that it was like five times further away. And I started spending more money on taxis and I started socializing less. And it really got to the point where it was just me and my music. And it was okay because that's what I was there to do. I really loved my music.

It was my partner. And I was okay with that. And then I went home and I was diagnosed with pulmonary arterial hypertension. That was a really long way of getting to that. I'm good at making relatively simple points really long. Swimming or sleeping? And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required.

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You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. So tell me what pH is. So I got, I was diagnosed with pulmonary arterial hypertension, which is a thickening in the endothelial lining of the lung or the blood vessels of the lung, which makes it difficult to absorb oxygen properly. And it causes what I affectionately call the reverse crunch effect.

My heart was three and a half times too big when I was diagnosed. Physical activity becomes increasingly difficult, and usually in two to five years, certainly without treatment, but even with treatment. I think when I was diagnosed, it was something like 70% of patients die. And so it's very operatic. It's very operatic. 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. And it made me happy. 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. And I went to see a couple of more doctors. then I found Brad Agourgas at Johns Hopkins Hospital who was running a trial at the time which made things easier with insurance because having a critical illness can easily bankrupt a family. I think he got me as a patient.

He understood that he could trust me. One of the hardest things is every time I went to the doctor, they'd ask me about my sex life. And I'd be sitting there flanked by my mother and my father. And it didn't matter that I didn't have any history because the doctors, they never believed me, never before Dr. Gerges. I once had a doctor go into the hall, scream at my parents that like they couldn't be in the room because they insisted they needed to be in the room when I was having these interviews because I obviously didn't feel open enough and like comfortable enough around my parents to tell him about my sexual history because there was no way that I didn't have a sexual history at that point. And finally, he sent me in alone with a

nurse and I was like, yeah, no, I really don't have anything to tell you about. And Dr. Gerges, he asked me one question, and I answered it. And he knew he could trust me. And he said, if that situation changes, just talk to me or talk to my nurse beforehand, and we'll make sure that you have what you need, that you'll, so you're safe. But, you know, there's this whole conversation going on right now about trusting women. And it's true. Like, it doesn't matter what we're talking about, especially when it comes to sex. I think we don't trust women. We don't trust what they say. We

don't trust their decision-making process. We don't trust what they say. We don't trust their decision-making process. We don't trust that they're acting in their own and others' best interests. And in medicine, it's often the same way, but I was very grateful I found a doctor who did trust me. And so I enrolled in Peabody after all, and I started receiving my treatment in Baltimore. So the approach was, let me take whatever treatment is available to me. And at the same time, I'm going to just keep pursuing this thing that I love and we'll see what happens. I was going to sing, gosh darn it. And I was hoping this trial would be successful for this first six months or for the first three months. We seemed to be making

progress. It was probably the placebo effect because after those first three months, or for the first three months, we seemed to be making progress. It was probably the placebo effect because after those first three months, the progress dropped off very rapidly. And over Thanksgiving, I really did not feel well. And I went to the doctors. They have to diagnose pulmonary hypertension. They have to do a surgery. It's a small surgery. It's a catheterization where they slither this tube through your jugular to your right ventricle, the right ventricle of your heart, and through the right ventricle of your heart into your lung. And they measure the internal pulmonary pressures because while my external pressures in my arm were very low, within my lungs, they were very elevated. And when I was diagnosed, I think they were around 80. And by the time six months had elapsed on this

trial, they were 146. And they're supposed to be between 15 and 25. So it was a big difference. You know, I'm all diva in everything I do. I do it big. So I had to go on this big gun drug for pulmonary hypertension, which is administered through a pump, which weighs about five kilos. It was not ideal for singing and it was really hard to manage. You have to mix the medicine yourself and you have to keep it on ice all of the time. If you get a bubble in the medicine, when you mix it every day, you can die. If you go through a metal detector, you can die. It's very fast acting. It only works for about 45 seconds. The side effects are awful. You're

covered in a hive-like rash all of the time. It makes everything taste like metal when you chew. A lot of people feel like they have a flu the entire time they're on the medication. I had just started macrobiotics a few days before I went on the medication. I think it really alleviated a lot of the side effects that I know a lot of my fellow patients went through. And it's a very strict diet, which is like a whole grain-based diet where you can't eat very much is the truth. And you have to chew your food 20 times or 50 times. Excuse me. It's really complicated, but it did help me a lot. You were performing at the same time. Yeah, I was performing. I stopped, obviously, when I went onto this medication, because when I had that heart catheterization, they kind of put me in

patient almost immediately. And so I had to get a number of incompletes that semester. But within a few days, I was walking again. Within a week, I was singing again. And then a few months, I debuted at the Kennedy Center. And so the medication worked, but I had to find a way of hiding it. The first time I sang just at a class recital after the surgery to insert this pump, I used to carry it around in, and my mom got me a long chump bag, which was, we did not do designer bags in the family with 11 kids. It's an easy way to cut, to cut expenses. But she thought that I needed something special. So I carried this longchamp bag around with me everywhere. And I got up on stage on the little platform to sing this aria for my class. And this girl who I think she was kind of well-intentioned,

she also kind of did not understand why I carried around this bag with me all the time, because I really tried to keep my deceased quiet. She lunged for my bag and she said, put down your silly bag. And she grabbed it and I was able to grab onto it before she pulled it away because it was attached surgically to me and but she could rip it out like that definitely was a possibility and it was then that I realized I needed to find a better solution when I performed and so I'd get a girdle and I'd put it on and I'd wrap the pump I'd stuff it into the girdle on my thigh and I'd stuff the pump into the girdle and then I'd wrap it with an ace bandage. And I'd do that when I performed. And so between scenes, between numbers, I'd go and I'd put it on ice.

But that was my solution. How did you feel when you would come up? I mean, was it exhausting when you came off stage after something like that? I always found performing very invigorating. I still do. I think I've been in, oh, I've had, I think my husband counted them up. I've had 40, together with performances, readings, talks, and press stuff, over 50 things that I've done in the last month. And in between, I'm exhausted. But when I'm in the midst of it, it's wonderful,

and it gives me a great deal of energy, especially when I sing. And so for about two hours, three hours afterward, I'm floating, and then I collapse and I'm tired. At some point, even this therapy stops working. Yeah. So I'd gotten a fellowship to study in Italy from my university, from Johns Hopkins. And so I was in Florence commuting between Florence and Milan doing research. And then two days after I got there to do research, I met this great old conductor who started casting me in all of these roles. He really liked my voice, which was great.

I think he also thought I was cute and that I should marry his son, who was 65, and I was 23. So that didn't end up working so well. But he was a wonderful, a wonderful conductor and very, very famous. And I learned a great deal from him. And then I got a fellowship to go and study with too. And life was really good, complicated, was kind of this epic figure in my family's life and sort of in history. He was a Holocaust survivor. He studied economics and he taught. And then he ran for Congress. And he was the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in the U.S. Congress. And he was there for almost 30 years.

And when he passed away, he was the chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee. And so it was this real rags to riches story, not riches, but because he was never particularly wealthy. But he made a great difference in many people's lives. And we were extraordinarily close. And so his death was very hard. But what came next was even worse. My father, exactly two months later, was driving in the mountains when his car malfunctioned. And he had burns over 70% of his body and he died. And his death really precipitated my medical decline. I came back to the States. I hadn't been back to Colorado for years and years and years. The altitude exacerbated my symptoms, but I had to go back and say goodbye. But within a few weeks, I was showing signs of right heart failure and I left knowing that I'd probably never see my home again. It wasn't all bad, like everything that happened in the wake of my father's and grandfather's deaths. Me and actually my two younger siblings, we all fell in love with the people who are now our spouses at that time.

And I think you really sort of figure out who in your life is going to be there in hard times and in the easy ones when you face loss. I had met my husband two years earlier on a political campaign that my sister and I just went out to volunteer for the weekend on. And he was lovely. He just was the loveliest man. I joked that we were going to create a Facebook page like women who are willing to have Yoni Daron's babies. He was just the nicest man. And I wanted to set him up with every girl I knew who was more Jewish than I was, who was lovely. And I finally had that opportunity at a 4th of July party because he had broken up with his girlfriend and I knew the perfect girl for him. And it was so exciting. And they were going to fall in love and they were going to get married and they were going to have babies. It was

going to be wonderful. And I was going to have orchestrated it all. Little did I know that the girl who he would end up with would be me. The girl who I wanted to set him up with didn't come. And the boy I invited as my date came with his own date. And so Yoni was there, which was very convenient because it made it much less embarrassing. And near the end of the night, this drunk old lady came up to me and she was like, is that your boyfriend? And I was like, no, that any young lady who has the pleasure of being his girlfriend would be lucky to have the job. And I just felt like I was being very magnanimous, you know, but I did feel that way, but I did not feel like I would be that person. And Yoni looked at me and he said,

really? And I was like, yes. And he said, would you feel that way about yourself? And I was like, let's change the subject. But very, very quickly, something just happened and nothing happened that night. And then he came the next morning and he waited for me at the airport for three hours, which if I would not have been awake all night thinking about him would have been the creepiest thing in the world. And I have had boys do things like that, where I was just like, you really shouldn't have, like, no, really, you shouldn't have. But I really, I loved him. I know that's so ridiculous to say, but I loved him. I'd never been in love before. But nothing happened again. And then he called me every day for the month and a half that I was at this music festival in Israel. And somehow he convinced me to come and visit him and his parents on Long Island. And he was late to pick me up at the airport. I almost got back onto the plane and went down to DC, but I didn't. And that night we kissed for the first time and I threw up. It was awful, but it was so funny. I

thought it was worth the story. I knew I'd never see him again, but then the relationship stuck. We've been together for almost 10 years now. He's a sucker for punishment, but we're pretty happy most of the time. So when I'm not dying, we're pretty happy. Tell me what else was going on around then. Because you come home, you meet him, and that is a wonderful thing that happens at the same time. Yeah. So I'm dying at the same time, which isn't so fun. And within a year, I desperately need a lung transplant. I do not want one. But I get to this impasse where Dr. Gurgis tells me, you either need a transplant or you're going to die. And I have another one of these sort of spiritual realizations that he's right. And so I go on

the wait list. And I'm going to go to Cleveland to wait for the lungs. The average wait at that point was about 1,000 days. And we got a call the next morning. They just changed the scoring system. So you got organs instead of organs being allocated by how long you've been waiting. on the basis of how sick patients are. And I was very, very sick, whether I realized it or not. And so I was not very happy about this development, but I was rushed to Cleveland. My family tried to get there in time. My sister came with me on the medevac, but my mother wasn't there and the rest of my family wasn't there. So I didn't get to say goodbye to most of my family. And when I went into surgery, it was a 13 and a half hour surgery. I was on every form of life support available. 40 pints of blood were infused into my body.

And when my surgeon finally emerged from the operating room, he told my poor mother that it was too late, that it was unlikely I would survive. My chest was left open for two weeks and you could see my oversized heart beating inside. I had an infection that ravaged my skin. But 34 days later, I woke up. I couldn't walk or talk or eat. I couldn't move. I couldn't even breathe. I certainly couldn't sing. But when I looked up, I saw these three figures, and I didn't know if they were angels or people.

And then the center figure, I squinted, and I could tell it was my mother. And I realized I was alive. And in the midst of the terror of not being able to breathe, not being able to talk, not being able to do anything, I did have this immense gratitude because I realized I was alive. And it would be two months before I could breathe on my own. And it was over 100 days before I'd go home. But I did. I never thought I would do it again. But I went home to Denver.

That was the beginning of the next chapter or the next act. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. One of the reasons, I mean, there are all sorts of reasons early to be concerned about double lung transplant.

Was one of them for you, in addition to what any other person would go through, was part of your hesitation? Not health, but you'd spent your life. These were the instruments of the expression of your passion. Yeah, I'd spent my whole life learning how to breathe, is the truth. And having these lungs that I had trained at this point since I was three years old, to work with my body to facilitate breath, to facilitate sound, to facilitate music and expression, like, was the worst thing in the world. When people say things are the worst thing in the world, I think that it's usually an exaggeration. Now, I hadn't gone through election 2016 when I thought it was the worst thing in the world. But at that time in my life, it was the worst thing in the world.

And I couldn't imagine having to retrain my entire body. And that's what I had to do. Did you think emerging from the surgery when you realize, oh, I'm actually alive, and then 100 days later, you go home to Denver. In your mind, because I'm sure you had conversation with your mom and with your surgical team and your doctors, like, can I ever? Like, first, of course, is like, will I be able to live okay? But eventually when that question starts to look like, you know, I'm alive, I'm going to continue on, like, will I ever sing again? Yes.

You know, the hospital is this amazing evolution of emotion. So first, you're just grateful to be alive and to see these people that you love and who care for you and that you care for again. And then it begins, like the grind of staying alive continues. And you realize you're a part of that path and it's really hard. And then you realize at some point I am going to go home and I am going to have to find myself and my life again. I'm not going to have this whole cast of characters of nurses and doctors and techs and respiratory therapists and physical therapists and occupational therapists and janitors and cooks and administrators, you know, looking out for me. I'm going to be doing this on my own and I need to figure out what that path is going to look like.

And about three weeks before I went home, maybe two weeks before I went home, and I could finally speak again, which was, gosh, as you can tell, I like to talk. And not being able to talk for months at a time was extraordinarily challenging. But the idea of not being able to sing in certain respects was even more frightening than not being able to talk. And I had had a tube going down my throat for months because I was on a respirator. And I asked the nurse who was on call, who I'd become friendly with, if I would be able to sing in the same way. And she said, you know, and she said, do you really want to know the answer? And I said, yes,

I need to be able to mentally and emotionally prepare for this. And she said, people don't sound the same after they've been on a respirator. You know, it messes with your vocal cords. You know, if you had those tubes, those breathing tubes going down your throat first, and then if you had to have a tracheotomy afterwards, it just won't be the same. I think that was the hardest moment of that entire hospital stay. And there were some really bleak moments, but the idea that everything that I had worked for was for naught in a way. My whole life had been about music and about making music and bringing music into the world. And I really felt like I had this voice that was made to sing. And the idea that that was destroyed

was devastating. Nonetheless, about three weeks after I got home, I decided that I was going to try and sing. I had this kind of traumatic experience around a reality TV show, but that's another story. And I decided that this was kind of going to be my way of healing from that whole experience. And I started to sing Smile by Charlie Chaplin, made famous by Nat King Cole. And the words are just, you know, smile when your heart is aching. I don't know how many, can I quote it on the show? I don't know. Oh, good. Smile when your heart is aching. Smile when your heart is breaking. When there are clouds in the sky, you'll get by. I think everybody knows the song. It's a great song. And I had this wisp of a voice. It was tiny. It was totally different from this big,

booming sound that I had become so accustomed to creating. But I started practicing every day. And I went from being able to barely, barely get through a single song, breathing every other word, to singing for a whole minute, to singing for two, to singing for four. And I'd double my time about every three days that I was singing, double the amount of time. And then my mom agreed to a performance without me knowing it. I thought I would wait a year before I'd perform. And she agreed to a performance, I think it was three months after I got home from the hospital, which seemed really soon. Maybe it was four months after I got home from the hospital. Nonetheless, it seemed really, really soon. And I got there and I went back to my teacher first. And when I got there, I thought it was for my doctors, but there were over a thousand people

there and there were some journalists in the audience. And while it wasn't the best singing of my entire life, I don't think I'd ever felt more proud of a performance. And it went really well. The audience went crazy. They loved it. And soon the story went kind of viral and I was fielding invitations all across the country and all around the world and it was really exciting. Yeah, so everything's coming back. The universe is rallying back to support you and the career returns, the voice returns and you're on stage also with new lungs and without the, I guess now, well, because of the transplant, you're on stage also with new lungs and without the, I guess now, well, because of the transplant, you're on a different medication regime because you have to be for anti-rejection. But at the

same time, the device and the pick lines and stuff like that were no longer a part of your... Yeah, it was a different experience of performance. And they were different lungs. So especially with the first transplant, the experience of singing just felt very different. They never felt like they were quite my lungs. I never felt a little further outside of my grasp than it had before the transplant. I don't think those lungs and I don't think, I know this sounds strange, but we didn't know each other that well. And they actually didn't fit that well. The surgery, one of the reasons it was so complicated is they had to trim the lungs and then sew them shut. So they were like too big for your body essentially? Yeah. They didn't realize it at the time, but I'd lost a lot of weight before the transplant. And the measurements had happened when I weighed about 15 pounds more than I did when I finally got the transplant. So they worked and I sang well, but they still never felt like they were quite my own.

Things went really well anyways, and my career was building, and I had requests from Universal Music to do an album. And I got a card at my first performance from this man who had a little goatee. And he said, call me, you're going to open a big TED conference this fall. And I'd been in Europe before all of this happened. And then I had been falling in love and dying the one year I was in the States. So I had no idea what a TED conference was. And so I was like, who's TED? I think I actually asked him that.

And so I ended up sending him an email. And he connected me to this fellow named Richard Saul Wurman and his partner at the time, whose name was Mark Hodosh. And so I ended up opening a big TED conference, which also, it was a good, it was a good match. And this experience of making music and telling my story was in many respects what I had been primed to do. I just didn't know it. And so I'd do concert work and then I'd sing and I'd tell my story and it was great. And then I got the flu and I started rejecting my lungs. And so it's literally like you get one virus and everything changes. So it's not always like that, you know, but this time that's how it happened. And I had one nurse, I've had an incredible cast of nurses and doctors who have by and large been just amazingly attentive and caring and decent. But I kept on calling this nurse about, who was my transplant nurse, or one of my transplant

nurses, because one of them was great, about this bug that I couldn't seem to shake. And the nurse kept on brushing it off and saying, oh, you know, these things just happen sometimes. You just have to let it run its course, which felt contrary to everything I'd heard about transplant. And also, I mean, the part of the medication that you have to take when you have a transplant is essentially suppresses your immune system. Exactly. Exactly. And so before I knew it, this infection had turned to full-fledged chronic rejection, which meant my lungs were irreparably damaged. Now, everyone who has a transplant goes into rejection.

I've been in rejection for two years. And my lung function is pretty close to the same as what it was two years ago. This rejection is very slow. And it could take 25 years to run its course before I would need another transplant. So rejection is part of everyone's life in different respects. And in transplant, rejecting the organs inside of your body is also just a part of what life will eventually bring, especially for lung transplants. But this was a very rapid rejection. And I could feel my body declining with not with every, well, yes, with every day,

because you blow into a spirometer every day when you have a transplant. And I could see the very slow but precipitous downward march of the numbers. And it would just be like one thousandth of a liter less than it was the day before, or four thousandths of a liter less than it was the day before. But instead of it being this consistent line, it was this downward march. And then in April of 2011, I got an invitation to debut at Lincoln Center, which was really exciting, but I didn't know if I'd make it because I knew I was sick. And I'd one of these times where everything was wonderful. My career was blowing up. I got engaged the next month to this man who had been by my side through all of this drama and trauma and personal disaster. But he'd also been able to be there during a lot of the triumph, which was wonderful to share with someone who had shared so many challenges with me. And so we were engaged to be married and I was getting ready for my Lincoln Center debut. And I was in two to three cities, sometimes a week, sometimes a month, depending on which week or month it was, and singing or talking.

And so life was good. I was making a lot of money. Everything was lovely, except I could feel my body declining and dying. And by September, which was the beginning of the month where I was supposed to make my debut, I couldn't do more than sit in the corner of my apartment and try to breathe. But inexplicably, I could still sing, which was very, very unexpected. And so once a day, I'd take off my oxygen. I think I was on like 10 or 15 liters at the time. And I'd belt out the aria from La Traviata that I was slated to sing at my debut. And after, there's a final high E flat at the end of the aria. And after singing it, I'd kind of crumpled back into my heap and start

breathing again. I just didn't know how I was going to get to Lincoln Center alive. It was challenging. It was dying as an ugly sport. And yet you went to Lincoln Center. Yeah, I did it. I did it. My doctors pumped me full of antibiotics and steroids and they did it. It was, you know, debuts can be a big letdown. You're a bit of a musician. You know how that goes when you put all of this work and effort into something and then you do it. And maybe it goes really well, but it's done. And it's just a letdown. You know, sometimes I've heard books can be like that too for people. That regardless of what happens, you've had this thing that you've been working on and toward for such a long time. And then you finally get there and you do it. And it's done. And it's just, it's kind of sad. It's like a kid graduating from some institution where it's just further away and they're not going to be a part of your life in the same way anymore. And it's a little bit sad. This debut was not like that. This was exactly what I always imagined a debut would be like, and so much more. I remember afterward, I was just tingling with excitement. I was on a lot of steroids at the time,

so that could have been it. But yeah, it was a wonderful moment. But then I was dying really soon again. And I walked down the aisle later that week. And so I was married, but it was hard. You know, workplaces are not particularly accommodating of sickness in homes. You know, if that family medical leave doesn't kick in for six months, and my husband was just starting a new job, which was very challenging at the time because his colleagues didn't know him well enough to feel a great deal of compassion for what we were going through. So he was working very long hours. He'd take me to the living room and put me on the couch and make me breakfast and prepare my lunch and put on my oxygen and leave at seven in the morning. And then oftentimes he'd get back at 10 and 11 o'clock at night and he'd make sure I I ate dinner and then he'd take me to our bedroom and he'd put on my pajamas for me because I couldn't do it for myself. It was a very lonely time waiting for a transplant

because you don't know whether you're preparing to live or die. I think it's always easier when we have some expectation of what the end of the path looks like. I guess dying is something we all have to do, but dying early or going through the process of dying early does feel particularly cruel. So from there, you're still here and we're talking. Yeah, so I got another transplant. They pumped me full of drugs in the hospital. On Christmas Eve, I went into the hospital and I hallucinated so much. For a young lady who never

drank and never did any drugs, I have done so many drugs now. I've done them all. When they're talking about all the opioids and the opioid crisis, it's hard for me to relate to because I hate being on opioids, like hate it so much. And I got off of them as quickly as I could, but I've done everything. I've done fentanyl, I've done oxycodone, oxycontin, like all of the oxys, all of the Vicodin, like Vicodin, I've done everything because my doctors needed me under or needed me. And it's funny because I hallucinated a lot in the hospital. And so one day, everyone was from Star Wars. My little sister was a baby Ewok. And one day, I thought I was in the CEO of the hospital's house with him and his wife doing a big fundraiser. And for some reason, I was lying on their kitchen table.

And there were just one hallucination after another. And then there would be these moments of clarity. But I didn't think I'd make it out of the hospital alive, but I did. I got a match. I got a transplant. And it has been a wonderful match from the first breath I took. It felt like a better match than my first transplant. So I feel very, very, very fortunate. Yeah. And did you feel, coming out of that,

did you wonder again whether you would sing? No. I knew I would sing. I knew I would sing. I knew I would breathe. I knew I would live. And I knew it was going to be easier. And it was, especially for the first three and a half years, it was a lot easier. But one of the things with transplant is since it weakens your immune system, it also makes you a prime candidate for cancer. And so three and a half years after my first transplant, I'd recorded a top-selling Billboard classical album, and I'd just signed this big book deal. And my husband and I, we'd been living in Harlem. He founded a company with his cousin early on in our marriage about a year after he started that first job that was very difficult when I was sick. And so he had been kind of managing me

more or less full time. And then his company really started to take off. It's called Branching Minds. And so we were here because he was doing Techstars, which is one of these big incubators. And we got home in that fall. I had a freckle. You have to keep really close track of your skin and your, I don't know, your body when you've had a transplant. And the freckles started to change. So I went to my dermatologist who did a biopsy. And in the time it took to conduct the biopsy and do everything else, the freckle turned to the size of a kumquat in the middle of my forehead. And they removed it. But I love eyebrows. I think eyebrows are the most important things on a face. And it destroyed

my right eyebrow. And I thought it was like the worst thing. And it was very, very traumatic. And then in January, I felt like a pin. At first I felt pain and then I felt like a pinhead in my jaw hinge. And then two weeks it grew to the size of my fist and the cancer had metastasized to my parotid gland. So that needed to be removed and my facial nerve needed to be cut. And so it was this whole new process of coming to know myself and understand who we are and what we value and how we identify as women because beauty is so much a part of what we are brought up to be. And to have my physical presence changed so quickly, it felt like going through the aging process in a matter of months instead of over decades and decades and decades

of time. It is hard to be a woman. It's really hard to be a woman sometimes. But I will say that this experience has brought me to this place of peace and understanding. And I realized that the people who I wouldn't want in my life anyways aren't as interested in being in my life. And the people who I would want in my life are, I think, might find it easier to connect with me than they did when I looked like a pageant queen. And so it's been a very interesting process. And this year we had the book, and so I've been traveling the country with that of late. And I debuted it at Symphony Hall this fall. But yeah, life's a crazy journey. It's a crazy journey. And in the middle of that, there was also a moment where you took the stage

with the daughter of the woman who donated your lungs. That was just a few weeks ago, actually. So about a year after my second transplant, I met the young woman who I am alive because of. And it's a complicated family story. You know, life is rarely simple and neither is death year, I was able to connect with her two other children who had been adopted by a wonderful family in Ohio. And then this past fall, because her daughter's names are Esperanza, which is hope in Spanish, and her other daughter is Eden Faith. And so it's Faith, Hope, and Charity, which is kind of ridiculous and fabulous and wonderful, that they both have beautiful voices. But Esperanza and I have been singing together for a while, but we'd never performed. And so this fall, we were able to take the stage and to sing together. And Esperanza, she was never able to know her mother very well. Her parents divorced when she was about three years old. But it's been this, I think, really healing experience for both of us because my first transplant, I definitely felt the weight of the passing of the person whose lungs I had

and the sorrow of their family. And the second time, I just felt this immense sense of gratitude. And so to be able to connect with the family of my donor in such a real way where we are able to be part of one another's lives. I went to Esperanza's wedding and she just had her first baby this past year. And to be able to see Eden and her brother Odin grow up and to get to know their family and to be a part of their lives, I think it's been very healing for all of us. And certainly it has for me. And so, but Esplanade has a wonderful voice. So yeah, that happened and it was magic. But I think more than anything, transplant reminds us of how connected we are as a human family. I breathe with the lungs of an immigrant. I have one adopted sister, Dulcia, the one who took me

to the opera when I was a little girl. She's from Honduras and they were in our congregation growing up. And my donor is also from Honduras and she was an American citizen because she married an American. But transplant knows no race or creed or color. On the inside, we are matched because of our genetic similarities to people who seem on the outside totally different from ourselves. And I'm now connected to these people of totally different lives and beliefs than I do. Esperanza's an evangelical Christian whose politics aren't her thing. And Eden and Odin's family, their political beliefs are different than my own, but I think we all believe in our responsibility to one another as members of the same human race. And so it's been a really wonderful thing for me to get to know them. So as we sit here, this conversation is part of Good Life Project. So if I offer the phrase out to live a good life,

what comes up? For me, living a good life, it's about creation. It's about making things. It's whether it's sound or beauty or wonder, whether it's family or children. I think to create is our birthright. And I don't think to create is our birthright. To create is our birthright. And it's contingent upon each of us to find what exactly it is we're supposed to create. My mom created 11 babies. And that was her great act of creation. I create sound and music and stories. And we each have something to offer and something to give and something to leave behind to make the world a little bit better. And so to me, that's what it's about. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, thanks so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we've included in today's show notes.

And while you're at it, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share the Good Life Project love with friends. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him.

Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple

Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary.