An opera singer takes the stage with two lung transplants

NPR features the soprano Charity Tillemann-Dick who has sung major roles onstage and is now singing through another person’s lungs.

When I was getting ready for my Lincoln Center debut, when I was standing backstage, I’d been in the hospital for ten days preceding that, and all I could think about was this person. And I’d never met them — they had no connection to me other than the fact that a piece of them was literally keeping me alive. It’s easy to feel very disconnected today; I’m so grateful that, as a transplant recipient, I am forced to remember how inextricably connected I am to people that I never met. But that they cared enough about someone they didn’t know at all to keep me alive.

Read her story here.