Opera singer performs with the daughter of lung-transplant donor

Associated Press

CLEVELAND

An opera singer still performing after two double lung transplants has debuted a song she wrote to pay tribute to the immigrant roots of her more recent donor.

Charity Tillemann-Dick and her lung donor’s 24-year-old daughter, Esperanza Tufani, sang the song together in front of about 200 doctors and medical executives at a Cleveland medical summit Tuesday. Tillemann-Dick wrote the song, “American Rainbow,” to honor her connection with her donor, a Honduran immigrant who died of a stroke in 2012.

“We are all part of this big human family, and I think transplants show that better than anything,” Tillemann-Dick said. “I breathe because of someone who came to this country looking for a better life.”

Tillemann-Dick was studying opera in Hungary when she discovered she had pulmonary hypertension, a disease that caused her heart to swell to three and a half times its normal size and was likely to be fatal without a lung transplant. After getting new lungs in 2009, Tillemann-Dick had what she calls “a tiny wisp of a voice.” A doctor told her singing high notes would kill her, but she persisted and went through months of therapy before starting to sing again.