Hayden Boyd
Davidson, N.C.

Anne and Hayden Boyd

Hayden Boyd first heard of the CFIDS Association of America last year, when his daughter, Anne, whose birthday is in December, announced to family and friends, “I don’t want any presents. Please make a donation to the CFIDS Association.”

Anne, now 43 and living in Los Angeles, fell ill with a bad case of the flu at Thanksgiving in 2009 and, in typical CFS fashion, never got well. Boyd says she went through a large series of tests that kept returning results pointing to nothing being wrong. When she was finally diagnosed with CFS, the illness was confirmed by exercise testing at the Pacific Fatigue Laboratory and a tilt table test.

“She was starting a new career as a landscape architect. She had a very demanding job, but she was very excited and moving forward in this new career,” Boyd says of his daughter. “She had a lot of friends. All that came to a screeching halt. She can’t work. It’s very difficult for her to stand for any period of time. She has to monitor her physical activity with a heart rate monitor – if she goes too far, she crashes and become physically fatigued and in pain. The ordinary business of her life has become extremely difficult.”

Boyd was set to make another gift in Anne’s honor this year when he visited the Association’s website and learned about the McGrath Family Foundation matching challenge grant. “This was a wonderful opportunity to leverage my donation. I like the way the CFIDS Association uses limited resources very effectively,” he says. “You are working to pull together the disorganized strands of research and make sense out of the whole. You are also advocating to get the federal government more involved, because from what I understand, it’s only recently that the condition has been taken seriously by federal research funders.”

Like other Catalyst donors, Boyd’s intrinsic motivation for supporting the fund is selfish – he wants his daughter to get well and have a good life. His training as an economist and a researcher also allows him to appreciate solid research findings. “A catalyst is something that speeds up a reaction in chemistry, and it seems to me that speeding up all these folks working on CFS is a very good thing to do.”

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