7th annual Reef's Run at Lake Tahoe to support the Hydrocephalus Association

LAKE TAHOE, Nev. - The 7th annual Reef's Run will be held on Sunday, September 8, 2024, at 9 a.m. Once again the run will be both starting and ending at Round Hill Pines Resort.

Sign-in and registration start at 7:30 a.m. and there be coffee, water, and light snacks to get your day started right. After the run, enjoy an ice-cold beer for those 21 and over, and ice cream for the kids provided by Crystal Creamery! Stay around for their awards ceremony, silent auction and raffle, face painting, music, snacks, and more.

If you can't make the run, head over for the silent auction and raffle, starting at 9:30 a.m. A DJ will keep the event upbeat.

All proceeds will go to local families in need, the Hydrocephalus Association which actively searches for a cure for hydrocephalus, and charities helping the families in need. Together we can help find a cure.

To sign up for the run, and for more information, visit https://www.reefsrun.com/.

September is Hydrocephalus Awareness Month. Reef was born in South Lake Tahoe at Barton Memorial Hospital on June 17, 2016. He couldn't wait to make an entrance and arrived nine weeks early, landing him at UCDavis Children's Hospital for 62 days. He had jaundice, then severe Respiratory Distress Syndrome (RDS), Pulmonary Hypertension, an emergency chest tube for a hole in his lung, two holes in his heart (both closed), two blood transfusions and the list went on for those first two months. The day after being weaned off the oscillating ventilator he had a brain ultrasound that showed he had developed an Intraventricular Hemorrhage (IVH), a brain bleed, with a grade 2 on the left and 3 on the right (out of 4 grades). Two weeks later he developed hydrocephalus and he had his first brain surgery on July 13, 2016.

He went home to South Lake Tahoe, and then an ultrasound at Barton on November 11, 2016, led them to a fast trip to UCDavis Neurosurgery for emergency surgery. He then faced a year of surgeries and treatments, and on November 28, 2017, he had his sixth, and final so far, brain surgery and is now headed into the third grade.

In January of 2018, Reef's family decided they didn't want their friends to put together a GoFundMe and instead started dreaming of ways to raise awareness and funds to help all those in need. They officially started their own nonprofit 501(c)3 - Reef's Race for a Cure Foundation - in April of 2019, and the Reef's Runs have been happening ever since.

Non-communicating hydrocephalus, also known as obstructive hydrocephalus, occurs when the flow of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is blocked along one or more of the narrow passageways that connect the ventricles within the brain.

The only treatment for hydrocephalus is brain surgery where a shunt is placed to drain the excess spinal fluid. New techniques like Endoscopic Third Ventriculostomy (ETV) with Choroid Plexus Cauterization (CPC), are starting to come forward but few surgeons in the country are trained to do so.

The primary treatment uses a device (shunt) developed fifty years ago that has one of the highest failure rates of any surgical treatment. Shunt malfunctions each year, and 36,000 hydrocephalus operations are performed annually. The medical costs of treating hydrocephalus are over $2 billion per year, yet the National Institutes of Health (NIH) invests less than $1 million per year in hydrocephalus treatment.