‘I’m in pain wherever I am’: the troubling rise of concussion in girls’ lacrosse

Becca Losch wore goggles and a mouthguard. She did exercises to strengthen her knee ligaments. Yet the prospect of a head injury barely crossed her mind.

In 2012, while a student at a New Jersey high school, she was hit in the back of the head by a lacrosse ball during a warm-up drill before a game. She does not remember falling to the ground, being helped up by teammates and carrying on.

The next six months were a blur of pain, confusion and frustration. Before her concussion, Losch was an energetic honour student who played lacrosse, basketball and soccer. Her health deteriorated so gravely that she struggled to read, write, walk up stairs and brush her teeth. She became too unwell to attend school, enduring migraines, eye pain, photosensitivity, insomnia, nausea, exhaustion, dizziness, tinnitus and an inability to focus.

That autumn she was referred to the concussion programme at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and slowly improved under treatment plans which included retraining her brain to improve her balance and vision problems.

After a year of homeschooling – cycles of 10 minutes of verbal tuition, then five minutes’ rest – Losch was able to return for her senior year, dictating essays into an app, graduating on time with honours and going on to attend college.

Now she wears headgear every day: a $30 ice pack bought from Amazon that she wraps around her head to soothe her migraines. Losch is convinced that her devastating injury would have been far less serious if she had worn a hard helmet, which was forbidden by the rules. “My doctors are pretty confident, especially where I was hit, on the back of my head, that it would have significantly decreased or I wouldn’t have had the injury at all,” she says.