Head of the Charles entry got here collectively to honor late Phillips Exeter coxswain

Within the closing race of the 2023 Head of the Charles Regatta, one explicit entry within the Administrators’ Problem Blended Eight was comprised of a bunch that was rowing collectively for the very first time.

They represented totally different rowing backgrounds — together with alumni from Phillips Exeter Academy, Princeton College, and members of the Boston Rowing Membership — and had been assembled from all around the United States.

Their unifying objective, past pulling collectively within the race, was to honor the reminiscence of a buddy.

Alex Manfull, a New Hampshire native, was simply 26 when she died in 2018 from issues of an autoimmune dysfunction referred to as PANDAS (Pediatric AutoImmune Neuropsychiatric Problems Related to Streptococcal Infections). It’s positioned underneath the overarching class of PANS (Pediatric Acute Onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome).

Manfull had attended Phillips Exeter, the place she first found her expertise as a coxswain with the crew program.

“She took to it like a fish to water, and beloved it, beloved being a coxswain,” recalled her mom, Susan.

Manfull went on to attend Princeton, the place she coxed for the boys’s varsity light-weight crew.

“She was very assertive and pushed and centered each in crew and out of doors of that,” recalled Andrew Wenstein, who rowed in boats that Manfull was coxswain for at each Phillips Exeter and Princeton.

“She was superb at simply getting folks to form of belief her and take heed to her,” he mentioned.

“Alex was vibrant, wholesome, had no historical past of psychiatric sickness,” her mom recalled. “She was wholesome generally, assured, good, all of the qualities that one would aspire to have.”

On the age of 19, she was recognized with streptococcus. Quickly after being handled, she developed “unambiguous OCD signs.”

For years afterward, Manfull sought a clearer medical rationalization of what was occurring to her, however the actual nature of her situation remained unclear. It wasn’t till she came across an outline of PANDAS that she started to unravel the thriller herself.

Even then, Manfull didn’t obtain a proper analysis till a number of weeks earlier than her demise.

“The dearth of educated physicians or different medical suppliers and psychological well being suppliers is a big impediment as a result of the dysfunction will not be normally acknowledged,” Susan defined. “It’s continuously misdiagnosed as OCD, or ADHD. And when that occurs, after all they don’t get the remedy that they need to.”

On condition that PANDAS wasn’t first recognized till 1998 (in a research from Dr. Susan Swedo), the issue of misdiagnoses stays intrinsically related with a lack of understanding.

Consequently, Manfull’s mother and father established The Alex Manfull Fund to assist help analysis, remedy, and to raise public information about its identifiable signs.

Within the ongoing effort to lift consciousness, they determined that assembling a consultant entry at this yr’s Head of Charles was a solution to obtain that objective at an occasion their daughter beloved.

Testomony to her spirit, present and former rowers from across the nation answered the decision.

“We began excited about doing this a few yr and a half in the past, and it took some time to form of work out all the logistics and pull it collectively,” mentioned Wenstein. “She was on groups at Exeter and at Princeton and at Boston Rowing Membership in the summertime in between. So it felt like we should always have folks from a couple of totally different areas of the rowing world.”

The ultimate end result was a decent 14th place among the many 31 Administrators’ Problem entries. Contemplating their lack of preparation, it was a job properly executed. And of infinitely higher significance, the Manfull Fund, each by its participation within the race in addition to a tent at Reunion Village, was capable of assist share details about PANDAS/PANS and supply entry to consultants.