Doctors Use Surgery to Relieve Lingering Concussion Pain

She was just a 12-year-old athlete when it happened: A blow to the head from a lacrosse ball left Marianna Consiglio with a severe concussion. Recovering from the brain injury took more than a year and a half, but it turned out that was the easier part.

Marianna and her family hadn't figured on debilitating headaches that often left her unable to function. The headaches lasted four years through every imaginable medical treatment. Nothing worked.

Then Marianna's mother, desperate for an answer, ended up on the Internet and came across a doctor she hoped could help. Last December, the Connecticut family traveled to Washington, D.C., to Georgetown University Hospital, where Marianna underwent outpatient surgery.

Marianna, now 16, was understandably skittish.

"I was almost at the point where I wanted to give up," she said. "I was really nervous about having surgery, but there was no way I couldn't try it."

On Dec. 15, Georgetown plastic and peripheral nerve surgeon Dr. Ivica Ducic operated on Marianna's occipital nerves, which he found were inflamed. The occipital nerves begin in the spine in the upper neck and run through muscles in the back of the head and into the scalp.

Ducic performed decompression surgery, shaving a tiny section of the muscle around the nerve to help free it.

"It's like unbuttoning your shirt and tie", Ducic told ABC News. "It's freeing up that area, enlarging the space around the nerve."

That night, Marianna spent the night in a hotel near the hospital. Her mother still remembers her daughter's first words the morning after the procedure.

"I don't have a headache," Marianna told her mom. "Zero. Zilch."

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Doctors Use Surgery to Relieve Lingering Concussion Pain