Two years ago, Meghan Duggan was lying nearly comatose at her parents' house in Danvers, Mass. The All-American ice hockey forward had recently been sidelined with a major concussion.

"I couldn't talk or eat," Duggan says. "I just sat at home in the dark, day after day, month after month." She had been named the best female hockey player in the country in March 2011, but just nine months later, it was unclear if she'd ever return to the ice.

"I just kept trying to be patient," Duggan says. "Obviously with an injury like that, you can't really force it." She spent a lot of time alone in her room with the shades drawn. (Concussion symptoms typically include headaches, dizziness, and trouble concentrating.) Reading, watching television, and even walking in the neighborhood were too painful. "It's hard to explain if you have never had a concussion, but you don't feel like yourself — something feels wrong."

"She was very frustrated," her dad, Bob Duggan, says. "She was wondering whether she was ever going to get back."

Now 26, Duggan is back on the ice as the captain of the U.S. Women's Olympic team. And although there is a growing body of research about the potentially harmful effects of concussions, the 5-foot-9, 163-pound University of Wisconsin grad can't be deterred. She already has a silver medal, from the 2010 Vancouver games, but she wants the gold. "One of my favorite slogans that I relate to sports is get comfortable with being uncomfortable," Duggan says. "I think I've used it in a driving force in my career since I've been on the path to make my second Olympics."

Duggan was 12 when she met Gretchen Ulion, a member of 1998 team, and decided she wanted to be an Olympian. "I put her gold medal around my neck, and her jersey on, and from that day forward, I was like, 'OK, it's going to be me,'" Duggan says. She's been on skates since she was 3, with a stick in hand by 4 — already driven to compete with her older brother, Bryan. "She thought she was a strong as him," her dad, Bob, says. "She thought she could play with all of his friends." In grade school she sought out the toughest competition, playing competitively with the top boys' teams out of Boston until high school. At 14, Duggan left for Cushing Academy, a boarding school in central Massachusetts with a renowned hockey program. There she was class president and played three varsity sports — lacrosse, hockey, and soccer. In college she led the women's hockey team to three national championships and majored in biology. ("She's a maniac," Bob says.)

In December 2011, Duggan collided with another player at an Olympic training camp and took an elbow to the back of her head. The injury almost ended her career. She wasn't knocked out, and instead of leaving the ice, she continued playing. She even drove after practice, which experts would recommend against. "She'd had a concussion in the past, and I think she kind of knew," Bob says. "Hindsight being 20/20, I think she probably wished she hadn't done that." Duggan rested at home for nearly six months until she was cleared to play again. "The minute she had a chance to get back on her skates she did, and it was probably a little too early, and that set her back a little bit," Bob says. "I think she struggled with, 'Am I done? What am I going to do now?'"

Duggan's injury is, unfortunately, not unique even within the Olympic team. Duggan's former teammate Caitlin Cahow, who already suffered two serious concussions, was named to U.S. delegation to Sochi but left the team because she no longer felt comfortable with the risk of another brain injury. In NCAA women's ice hockey, concussions account for about 25 percent of injuries, and an NCAA study found the sport has the highest rate of concussions in college athletics, beating out football and men's hockey. In the NCAA the concussion rate for women's ice hockey is 2.72 per 1,000 player hours, whereas the concussion rate for men's hockey is just over half that at 1.47 per 1,000. For NCAA football, the rate is 2.34 per 1,000.

"We tend to think of concussions with little boys playing ice hockey or football, and we think concussions aren't as common with girls' sports. I'm not really sure how much the public is aware, but they should be," says Elizabeth Teel, a researcher at UNC Chapel Hill's Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center. Higher concussion rates for girls are not limited to collegiate sports. While youth ice hockey was not looked at specifically, a 2012 study found young girls to have an increased risk of traumatic brain injuries compared to boys playing the same sports. Girls had a higher rate of concussion in soccer, 3.4 per 10,000 exposure hours, compared to boys' 1.9, in basketball they had a rate of 2.1 to boys' 1.6, and softball players had a concussion rate of 1.6 compared to 0.5 for baseball players.

Although no one knows exactly why there are gender differences in concussion rates, UNC researcher Jason Malick has suggested that brain injuries could be more common in women's hockey because the players don't see the hits coming. Women's ice hockey is still less aggressive than the men's game, and the rules prohibit fights as well as full-body checks. "Unanticipated collisions tend to cause concussions," Malick said presenting his findings to the Mayo Clinic in 2010. But the female players can "bump and grind," or use their body to get to the puck, something Duggan relishes, and there are still flying pucks, falls on the ice, and crashing into the boards. Anthony Kontos, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center who focuses on concussion-related research, says there are a handful of theories that still have to be studied further. One possibility is that their neck muscles are weaker than those of male players, which can make their heads more vulnerable to concussions.Kontos adds that the treatment is key when it comes to managing these injuries. "What we do know is when this injury is managed properly and in a timely fashion, many of the immediate consequences, such as longer-term symptoms and prolonged impairment, can be mitigated and can be gotten back to their sport in a safe and appropriate manner."

While researchers note that there is still uncertainty about the long-term risks of multiple concussions, former athletes have filed lawsuits against the NHL, NCAA, and NFL claiming long-term damage from sustaining traumatic brain injuries in their sports. The worst-case scenario is chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative disease found in a handful of former NFL and NCAA football players that is believed to be caused by repeated head trauma and may lead to mood swings, emotional changes, and dementia. "There's a big debate right now in the concussion community around what kind of long-term risks are we putting our athletes up for?" Teel says. "And the answer is, we're still trying to figure that out." This year the NFL agreed to pay $765 million to thousands of former players suffering from dementia and other concussion-related health problems. Former NHL players have filed similar suits, alleging the league actively concealed the scientific evidence of the danger of sustaining multiple concussions and didn't do enough to protect players from the risks. On the college level, dozens of former NCAA football players are taking the governing body to task with similar complaints. In October, Mary Shelton Bryant Wells, a soccer player from Alabama's Samford University, filed a lawsuit claiming the NCAA failed to tell student-athletes the health risks associated with successive concussions. USA Hockey, which oversees the U.S. Olympic Team, could not be reached for comment.

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Almost a year after her injury, Duggan checked into the Life Functional Neurology Center in Marietta, Ga. She worked with Ted Carrick, a chiropractic neurologist who also treated NHL star Sidney Crosby, and she spent a week in nontraditional, intense neurological therapy — essentially chiropractic rehab for the brain — that included everything from vision training to the use of gyroscopes to reestablish neurological processes. "We have an epidemic of head injuries," Carrick says. "These injuries are not trivial — they can ruin your life. You can't just go to Sam's Club and pick up a new brain." Carrick's research is controversial in the scientific community, but Duggan says she was healed.

In February 2013, she returned to the ice once again. She won the International Ice Hockey Foundation's Women's World Championship title in April. Though Duggan knows she's taking a risk, she says missing the Olympics was not an option. "There were times that were really bad where I didn't know how it would end up for me, so I definitely feel lucky," she says. "I think back [to] when I was struggling really bad. I was thinking of the pros and cons of getting back in and actually taking another hit. But since I've been back and I feel strong and I haven't had any problems, I don't feel any hesitation."

From September 2013 until they left for the Olympics, Duggan trained with the team six days a week. Their goal in Sochi is to take home the gold, but more specifically, it's to beat the Canadians, something the U.S. hasn't done since women's hockey was added to the lineup in 1998. Unlike the American men's players, who take a break from million-dollar NHL careers before returning home to the playoffs, this is the women's Stanley Cup. Canada has taken gold in the last three Olympics, and the rivalry is so heated that fights have broken out in two separate pre-Olympic matches. Duggan hasn't been involved in the scuffles, but she says she wouldn't back down if tested: "We don't like them, plain and simple. None of us condone fighting — it's not a part of the women's game — but we won't be pushed around."

When I met Duggan in early January, she was lifting weights at Mike Boyle's strength and conditioning gym in Woburn, Mass., about 20 miles northwest of Boston. As a player she's known for tough physical play, born partially from years playing with the boys. Not only is she taller than the other players, she's known to make things difficult for her opponents. "I don't want to call it chip on her shoulder, but there's this grit with her," fellow forward Hilary Knight says. "You don't want to play against her because you know she's going to bear down a little bit more than everyone else."

The jolt of positivity she brought to the room was palpable, a combination her coaches and teammates say make her a natural captain. "She gets along with everyone on the team, and we know we can go to her in any situation," teammate Anne Schleper says. "For example, we just got done with a good lift, and now we have to go practice. It's tough. Sometimes you don't want to do it. She's the voice when everyone is silent saying, 'Hey girls, we've got this. Pick it up, this is another workday.'"

Later that afternoon at practice, Duggan was sitting on the bench, waiting to be called back onto the ice. A puck whizzed past my head so fast I only heard it land. "Not a good place to sit!" head coach Katey Stone yelled at me, as I realized why it's so easy to get a concussion in this sport. "Go, Mo!" Duggan called out to teammate Monique Lamoureux, banging her stick against the board before gliding out onto the ice herself.

"Meghan goes hard. If you told her to walk from here to there, she'd want to walk the fastest," Stone says. "She is one of those kids that's easy to get behind."

Duggan insists the injury hasn't changed the way she plays. "Hockey is a rough sport obviously and my style of play is very rough as it is, but no, I don't play nervous at all," she says. "I think if you ask any of my teammates they would say the same thing. I'm going into the corners as fast and hard as anyone else."

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