Eating bugs in Texas...

Last weekend, I was in Texas for the Woodlands CrawPHish Festival.  It's a great event that started out in 2008 under my all-time favorite event name - the Cure PH Bug Boil.

But there's more to the history.  In 1999, Jack Stibbs connected with PHA and said he and his family wanted to organize a golf tournament for PH research.  It would be PHA's first large-scale event.

Jack and his wife Marcia's daughter, Emily, was diagnosed with PH two years earlier, when she was five years old.  I met Jack and Marcia that year when they and I both attended our first board meeting.  That was a dozen years, 10 golf tournaments, a few galas and 3 bug boils/crawPHish festivals ago.  In the intervening years, Emily has grown up to be a lovely young woman who is now attending college and the events that this amazing family, including son Jake, and their devoted and driven team of volunteers have produced have generated over $1,800,000 for pulmonary hypertension research!

Jack will be the first to tell you that a true backbone of all these events is Matacha Saul.  Matacha began work with Jack as his legal assistant three months before their first event and was immediately (and willingly) drafted into working on that first golf tournament.  Today, she is the firm's office administrator, marketing coordinator and Jack's legal assistant.  Somehow, with all that, she is able to keep these amazing events going and growing.  At PHA's 2010 International Pulmonary Hypertension Conference, she received the Julie Hendry Memorial Award for her extraordinary efforts over the years. This year's effort - the CrawPHish Festival - drew over 3,500 happy bug-eaters, up from 2,000 last year!

Here's Matacha telling us why she does what she does. We are so very grateful.

Oh, and when this video is over, you might want to take a look at the other short video interviews I did with some other great folks (love that FlipCam!)...

As we begin...

Five days into the new year, we had our first big meeting.

In 2011, PHA will deliver over three million dollars of medical education across five programs in our Medical Education Fund.  This is extremely important in a field where the number of treating physicians has grown from about 100 to well over 6,000 in little more than a decade.  It is important to expand knowledge of diagnosis and treatment and to connect medical professionals with experts in the field. 

With two medical associations (one for physicians and researchers, the other for nurses and other allied health professionals) operating under the PHA umbrella, the organization continues to be in a great position to deliver this knowledge in ways that help to improve practice in the field.

PHA manages several of these programs directly but also uses contractors to provide support on logistics and slide development.  

Today, we met with our primary contractors to finalize plans for 2011 programs.

Long-time board member Jack Stibbs flew in from Houston to join us.  As our volunteer (thank you Jack!) attorney, Jack has guided PHA through a decade of important legal agreements and he was here today to help us again.

This time Jack came with his daughter Emily, now a college freshman.  One of the great joys of our work here at PHA is seeing young patients grow to young adults...and indeed Emily, who was diagnosed at age six is one of those.

...and it was great to have her help our Patient Outreach and Services staff, Emma and Michal, review our programs for young patients.

All in all, today was a very good day...a very good start for the year.

So, thanks again to the Stibbs family.  That's Jake, Marcia, Jack and Emily in the picture - at the Crawfish Festival they organize every year to support PH research.  Their next one is March 26, 2011!

From 200 to 2,000 in 2 years...

Jack and Marcia Stibbs, Matacha Saul and the great and loyal volunteers of The Woodlands, Texas are rainmakers in support of PH research!

Jack's first event for PH research was a golf tournament in 1999.  It grew and grew, until three years ago, Jack said, "I think it's time for a changeup."

And changeup he did...from golf to bugs. Well, allright, crawfish. 
That first year I went to the Bug Boil. It was a great and sunny day, attracting a crowd of over 200people.  We ate a lot of crawfish, alligator and potatoes, drank a lot of beer and enjoyed a great zydeco band.  It was a great and fun day.

This year, two years later, 2,000 people consumed 6,000 lbs of crawfish, 160 lbs of alligator and 2,000 pieces of chicken.  Oh, and there was a refined name change to Crawfish Festival....with even more fun.

Last Saturday's event had to turn people away - and what I hear from Jack - is already planning on growing from A Houston-area event to a regional event in 2011. 

Over the years, the Woodlands team has raised well over a million and a half dollars for research through their great efforts and built tremendous awareness of pulmonary hypertension in the Houston area.  Despite their strange food tastes (sorry Jack, I couldn't resist!), all of us at PHA are deeply grateful for what they have done and continue to do to fight this disease.  THANK YOU TEXAS!

Enjoy a great slideshow of this event