Looking Ahead

Pucci has known Decker since youth hockey, and they have discussed creating a nonprofit organization to address concussions. Pucci works in clinical research at a cerebral vascular lab at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center and hopes to focus her work on concussions in the future.

For now, Decker occasionally posts on a blog she created in September, The Invisible Injury, while the hockey sticks in her garage gather dust.

She enrolled in a comprehensive concussion evaluation program with Kutcher at Michigan and said she was making “slow but steady progress.”

Decker said she did not know the best solution for curbing concussions in women’s hockey. Like many players, though, she said that more awareness would make a difference.

“You see left and right in doctors’ offices and wherever, your quick little synopsis of what a concussion is, what are symptoms,” she said. “Everyone knows those; it’s textbook. But when you get beyond the typical couple of weeks’ recovery, it’s like, then what happens? That was the challenge I faced.”

Decker added: “There wasn’t a clear-cut path for me or guidance as to what that next step should be. You can’t be running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to get help. There’s a lot of room for improvement in terms of concussion awareness and what that actually means.”