Education Freestyle

Cited: ABC News

On October 26, opera singer Charity Tillemann-Dick took the stage to open this year’s TEDMED conference in San Diego for an exquisitely sung aria! This conference is one that examines the novel approaches to medicine and health care as well as marking an anniversary for the singer. It was one year ago the chart you will from a month-long coma that follow a typical double lung transplant.

At age 20, Tillemann-Dick was just starting her singing career in Europe when she was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension, a condition in which the arteries supplying the lungs have unusually high blood pressure, putting patients at risk for heart failure.

“I saw a specialist and she told me that I had to stop singing, that those high notes were going to kill me,” the soprano said at Tuesday’s conference. “She was emphatic: I was singing my own obituary.”

But Tillemann-Dick did not give up singing and even when her condition worsened and she had to carry around a 4-pound apparatus that delivered medicine to her continually just to be able to function, she managed to perform all over the globe.

“She just wasn’t going to let [her condition] rule her life,” the singer’s mother, Annette Tillemann-Dick says.

After her father died suddenly however, her condition worsened, as did her voice. When the singer had right heart failure due to her worsening symptoms, she finally gave in to her doctor’s advice and agreed to a double-lung transplant.

Singer Gets New Set of Pipes

Given that opera singing focuses heavily on proper breathing technique, Tillemann-Dick was less than floored when the impossible happened: a donor from Texas was available as a match within days of her agreeing to undergo the procedure.

“I had spent my entire life training my lungs. I wasn’t enthusiastic about giving them up,” she says. She asked her surgeon at the Cleveland clinic, Dr. Ken McCurry, to please try to save her voice. Knowing that the breathing tubes put in place after her surgery would no doubt destroy her voice, while still in a post-operative coma, surgeons performed a special procedure to reroute the tubes to preserve a slim chance that Tillemann-Dick might perform again.

Off-Topic Breach: If you are planning your wedding, you want that day to be perfect in every way! You want everything from San Diego CA wedding flowers to wedding decorations to wedding chair covers to wedding uplights and one company is proud to help make the perfect wedding come true in anywhere in Southern California. Enjoy the convenience of taking care of all or some of these services with one professional and well-experienced company with one of their San Diego wedding packages.

Long Road to Recovery

The surgery had been a trying one, with the singer flat-lining twice and the month-long coma following left doctors wondering why she was not waking up.

By the time she woke from her coma, she had been on a respirator for so long that her diaphragm had atrophied, forcing her to relearn the simple task of breathing — a feat that took two and a half months, she says. It was Christmas Eve last year, just months after her surgery, when she first attempted to sing along with her occupational therapist to a Christmas song.

“It wasn’t much of a voice, but it was something,” she says. Now, just a year later, her vocal couch says that her voice is even better than it was before her surgery.

To this day, Tilleman-Dick says she thinks often of the first doctor’s prescription, that she should never sing again. She credits doctors at Johns Hopkins and the Cleveland Clinic for believing that she could have a higher quality of life than that.

“We need to stop letting disease divorce us from our dreams. We will find that patients don’t just survive, we thrive,” she said, closing her presentation.

A Lung Breathing Outside the Body

Tilleman-Dick’s story highlights the incredible medical feats made possible by organ transplantation, but it was the next presenter at TEDMED, Dr. Shaf Keshavjee, director of the Toronto Lung Program, who is taking transplants to a realm usually left to science fiction.

“Charity would not be alive today if it were not for her lung transplant,” Keshavjee said Tuesday. He “marvels” at what transplant can do for patients today and the technology he and his colleagues are working on with hopes to extend the number of patients who can undergo transplantation by improving the quality of donor organs available.

How does he intend to do that? Using an apparatus he helped create that allows a human lung to breathe and live outside of the human body. Using a freshly-harvested pig lung as a demonstration on stage October 26, Keshavjee showed how a donor lung can live independent of any body long enough for doctors to use sophisticated therapies on it, such as genetic modification, that make it more suitable for donation.

“It’s fascinating,” domestic guru and TEDMED attendee Martha Stewart said as she, as one of a few volunteers from the audience, was allowed to squeeze the breathing lung with a gloved hand.

Normally, to slow the process of dying, donor tissues are flash-cooled, a process that makes it harder for the organ to get up and running once transplanted. With this apparatus, the lung not only doesn’t have to be cooled but it can be treated and improved and hopefully, one day can be made to match the patient’s body so closely that rejection — the ruin of many transplantations — will no longer be an issue.

“We have transplanted 30 patients with lungs we wouldn’t normally use [using this technology]. Now 30 people are alive. It’s something I certainly never thought I would see in my lifetime,” he says.

TEDMED website explains “from personal health to public health, devices to design and Hollywood to the hospital.” This is a annual conference dedicated to increasing innovation in the medical field of study.

————————————————————

My Take: It is absolutely amazing what they can do with medicine these days. That is like the Sigvaris support stockings became out with years ago. They help people with heart problems by keeping circulation going in their legs. If you did not know, many people with heart problems suffer from swelling legs because they cannot move around as much. It is called edema or water retention and makes circulation in the legs difficult. Compression stockings keep the edema from forming and thereby helping circulation.

Believe it or not, even a liposuction surgeon will recommend the stockings for patients after surgery. Because when you don’t move around very much, you can get swelling of the legs. That is why a plastic surgeon will recommend them. Of course, it does not mean you have to wear them. And yes, it is usually a cardiologist or even a pulmonologist who orders or recommends the use of support stockings.

The funny thing is, people like waitresses, bartenders and even maids for a maid cleaning service where the precursor for support stockings and that is hosiery. Even the football star Joe Montana was known to wear hosiery because of the support that he gave his legs. So the next time you need Maryland house cleaning and maid comes in, do not be surprised if he or she is wearing hosiery!

————————————————————

Other Resources

Wilderness Shelters

Everyone has seen programs on the television that describe harrowing moments in the wild when a person has become lost far away from civilization and has forgotten to pack a survival kit and is out of range of a cell phone tower. The best way to survive the night in those circumstances if that person is without a tent or other shelter is to create a temporary place to rest within the branches of nearby trees. Although the cold weather might not be kept out by the simple branches, it’s likely that layering a significant number of branches upon one another may be sufficient to keep high winds out.