Behind Caroline Ducharme's recovery from head injuries, return to UConn basketball

Caroline Ducharme turned to face the hoop as the ball sailed above her. Standing between the UConn women's basketball freshman and the basket, a DePaul forward reached her arm back to prevent Ducharme from getting the ball, smacking her on the bridge of her nose. Hard. Ducharme's head whipped back at the impact as she crumbled to the floor, clutching her face. Her parents, Todd and Chrissy Ducharme, watching the game on TV, held their breath. "We were so scared," Chrissy told CT Insider. The hit caused a concussion. Caroline woke up the next morning with a severe migraine and nausea. It was the first of at least four hits to her head within the span of 22 months. Ducharme's life forever changed following that January 2022 game against DePaul. She would battle concussion symptoms nearly every day over the next two years. Some days, she couldn't get out of bed, unable to be around harsh lights. Good days were often met with another hit, another concussion and more pain. Her jaw pain prevented her from eating as much. Her moods fluctuated. Her spirit died. "I knew people that had concussions and, you know, had to step away from sports or school or whatever," Ducharme said. "... But you never really think that that's gonna happen to you." Nobody, not even Ducharme herself, knew if she'd ever take the floor again. Things changed when Ducharme and her parents found specialized care in Florida. The Ducharme family relocated to Florida from Massachusetts for three months last year when Caroline was treated at the Aviv Clinics. The treatment transformed her. She returned to the court this season and played in UConn's national championship win over South Carolina in Tampa at a sold-out arena of 19,777 fans on April 6. She'll return to Storrs in the fall for her final collegiate season, the healthiest she's been in years. It's been a long, heavy journey, but the guard hopes that by telling her story, she can help inspire those suffering from head trauma and concussions. "I was reluctant to share it, or just be open about it, the whole process. I kept it pretty personal. Even people close to me, I don't think necessarily knew how bad it had gotten," Ducharme said. "... It's not like other injuries. And I didn't necessarily know who to go to or somebody who had been through it. So just to be that person for somebody else and have somebody be able to watch my story and think, 'Well, it is possible to come back from, and it's not over.' It's not as career-ending as people think it is." Needed pause Chrissy Ducharme hardly recognized her daughter. Caroline was a shell of herself. She couldn't get out of bed, couldn't leave her room. Most times she tried, she got nauseous, dizzy and threw up. Even with the lights off, her head pounded with pain. Ice packs provided quick relief, but never enough. "It was hard," says Chrissy, holding back tears. "She was in so much pain and was miserable. We came down (to Storrs) with our dog just to be with her. It just was awful. I mean, she had no life to her. She had no energy. She was just in a very bad way." Added Todd: "It was really hard, because you can't do anything. There's nothing you can do. We would go to all the games knowing that she might not even be in the stadium, just to give her a hug after the game and look at her to see how she was doing, because that's the only way you could tell. You'd talk to her on the phone, and she'd say, 'I'm fine, I'm alright.' She didn't want us to worry." Unlike an ACL tear or a broken bone, concussion symptoms are internal. There's no set timeline for recovery. No clear steps to return. There's concussion protocol, but what happens when symptoms last for weeks, months or years? Ducharme got her first concussion on Jan. 26, 2022, during UConn's game at DePaul. She subbed out moments after taking the hit to her nose to catch a breath, but ultimately checked back into the game and continued playing, even making a last-second shot to seal the victory. She played the next two games for UConn before sitting out four as her concussion symptoms failed to go away. About a year later, she got hit again when she ran into a practice player's screen. "That was the worst one," she says. She took an elbow to the head a few months later during the 2023 Big East Tournament, and another hit during UConn's trip to Europe that summer during one of the team's exhibition games. A few months after that, she again got hit during UConn's game at Minnesota on Nov. 19, 2023. About four days after the game against the Gophers, a bad case of turbulence hit the team's plane on their flight to the Cayman Islands. Ducharme knew it was time to get help and chose to take a break from basketball. Basketball was no longer the priority. She needed her life back. "I think people would try to kind of like, cautiously bring it up, like even my doctors would be, like, 'Have you thought about, you know, how long you want to keep doing this? Or have you thought about taking a break?' And I would always just be like, 'No, no, no,'" Ducharme says. "... But I just felt like I couldn't do it anymore. And I feel like that was a big step, because throughout the whole thing, I always wanted to push through it. I never really wanted to admit how bad it had gotten. So, for me to be the one to be like, 'No, actually, I don't think I can do this anymore.' That's what I knew it was really bad." The brain takes time to heal. It cannot be rushed, and time off, away from sport and physical activity, doesn't always cure the injury. What makes returning from concussions so difficult to manage is that most symptoms are late onset, and some last longer than others. Symptoms can be as obvious as nausea and vomiting, while others are as subtle as mood changes and slower reaction times. "Repeated concussions increase your risk for more damage from the previous concussion," said Dr. Mohammed Elamir, a lead physician at Aviv Clinics who worked with Ducharme. "They build on each other. ... Often there's chronic injury from the first concussion, and when you have that second one, that just compounds the damage and the effect." Ducharme worked closely with UConn's medical staff since her first concussion. They kept her out of games and practices while on concussion protocol and limited her contact when she was slow to return. Yet, after two years of symptoms and nothing quite working, the Ducharme family decided to look elsewhere. "I feel like we kind of tried literally everything, injections, rehabs, different like needling, different therapies, like, we tried everything, and it had been, what, two years of that," Ducharme said. "So, I feel like at that point, we had outgrown everything that I could do there, and we knew that I needed to see a specialist." Summer stay Ducharme was the nation's No. 5-ranked recruit coming out of high school in 2021. She was a high school All-American and a two-time Massachusetts Gatorade Player of the Year. Heck, she's a UConn Husky. She's built tough and can handle an intense workout any day. But sitting inside Aviv's hyperbaric chamber while wearing a mask of 100 percent oxygen and doing brain games was hard. She stared at the tablet in front of her and paid attention as the screen showed numbers 1 through 6 inside tiny bubbles. The game asked her to tap each bubble in numerical order as the bubbles floated up and down on the screen. "I hated that one." She says. The combination of so much brain power while undergoing treatment was difficult for Ducharme, made even harder by the fact that she wasn't surrounded by her teammates for support. "I'm used to being physically tired or being physically taxed or physically drained, and this, like, I would come home and just be exhausted," she says. The Ducharme family moved to central Florida in the spring of 2024 so Ducharme could receive treatment from Aviv Clinics, which specializes in providing holistic hyperbaric therapy to patients suffering from head trauma, strokes and more. It's the only clinic of its kind in the United States. Ducharme was introduced to Aviv Clinics through a mutual connection and did a three-day assessment during her initial consultation. It was then that Aviv's staff ran numerous tests, including a SPECT scan, which is a metabolic CAT scan that looks at the functionality of the brain. "Even if your MRI looks fine, which for Caroline it was, the SPECT scan will show abnormal metabolism in parts of the brain for memory or motion or whatever the issue is," says Dr. Elamir. "That's a really good way to help diagnose post-concussion syndrome. And if there are injured cells that haven't been healed yet, even months later, that's the sign that says you could actually benefit from this treatment." Seeing the results of the SPECT scan showed exactly how bad Ducharme's concussions had damaged her brain and how much of her brain remained unhealed. Aviv Clinics said it could help heal Ducharme's brain and restore function to its damaged cells, but it wasn't a one-and-done type of treatment. It would require a move to Florida and a three-month individualized treatment plan. For five days a week for 12 weeks, Ducharme spent two hours each day inside the clinic's pressurized hyperbaric chamber. During each session, she was instructed to wear a mask of 100 percent oxygen for 20 minutes while completing brain games or resting. Ducharme said she often listened to Spotify, meditation and church sermons to relax. She'd get a five-minute break after each 20-minute session before putting the mask back on for another 20 minutes. "When the mask is on, your oxygen level is very high, 17 times higher than normal. When the mask is off, your oxygen level goes to normal," said Dr. Elamir. "The key to the treatment is to fluctuate your oxygen levels back and forth, and that's what triggers growth of new cells in the brain, growth of new blood vessels in the brain to help better blood flow, to improve metabolic function in the brain cells. "And this is applicable to every organ. Caroline, of course, we were dealing with her concussions in the brain, but this is applied to her heart, her muscles, all the organs. So, yeah, she's going to be healing from her concussion and injury, but she's also going to improve her performance." On top of her daily work inside the chamber, Ducharme worked with a team of specialized physicians and therapists from Aviv, including a trainer, a physical therapist, a neuropsychology team, a dietitian and a medical team. Aviv set up the Ducharme family in a house nearby. "Being down there, being away from everything, was hard. It was great to have her friends and Paige (Bueckers) come down and visit. So, that was helpful, but it was hard," says Todd. "She was there for five, six hours a day, training and rehabbing. And it was exhausting, but it was the first thing that we did, or that she did, that we finally got Caroline back, like the old Caroline. "Forget (basketball) at this point. For Chrissy and I, it was like basketball was the last thing on our minds. Great if it happened, great if it didn't. We finally saw her personality back." About two months into her treatment, Aviv found Ducharme an open gym at a nearby school and brought in a shooting gun so she could practice shooting with a basketball. The trainers tracked her catch and release times and monitored her energy. It was the first time she'd held a basketball in six months. Yet, it was hard to tell. "She shot 84% from 3. 84 out of 100 makes the first day back," Todd said, beaming. "Of course, we were trying to downplay it, because she didn't make it a big deal. We said, 'Honey, that's incredible. You must be feeling good about that.' And her response was, 'Well, I should be able to. There's no defenders." Getting back on the court, even if still under treatment and not quite 100 percent healthy, was a turning point in Ducharme's recovery. "When I was able to actually work out again, I started feeling like an athlete again, instead of just like, you know, a patient, really," Ducharme said. "So, I was able to actually work out and actually shoot and, you know, be tired from a workout, and I hadn't had that in so long." Even though the treatments healed Ducharme's brain, getting cleared to return to games required more time. She'd been out for about two years and needed time to get back in shape and build up stamina. She sat out about the first four months of this past season before making her return to the court on Feb. 22, 2025, at Butler. Her first game in 461 days. Back in Florida, Aviv physicians put UConn's games on the office TVs so everyone could watch and follow along. "All of us in the clinic, her first rebound, her first points, when she got back in those couple games, we were all elated and so happy for her," Dr. Elamir said. "We're very, very very proud of her, because it's a lot of work, a lot of work to recover, a lot of work to go through this program." One more year Caroline Ducharme didn't want to return to basketball if it meant she couldn't play full time. That's why she's returning to Storrs for one more go-around next season. The soon-to-be fifth-year guard graduates this summer and will have one more year to lace up her sneakers for the Huskies. However, this year will be special because it'll be her first full season back since her sophomore season. She has a newfound appreciation for life and for basketball. "There were times where I couldn't even go and form shoot or just, like, hear a ball bouncing. And now I'm getting through full practices and subbing into games," Ducharme said. "So, I think just being appreciative of the little things and the moments that you not take for granted, but you think, 'Oh well, you'll always have.' "Like, I always had basketball. It was, you know, something that I could always rely on, something I always fell back on, something I was always good at, something I always loved. And when I didn't have that, it kind of made me shift perspectives." She continues to work with Aviv, doing follow-up check-ins about once a month. On the court, she's slowly getting her feet back under her. Ducharme played nine games this season, the most since her sophomore year in 2022-23. She played a season-high 11 minutes against Arkansas State on March 22 in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, recording a season-best six points and four rebounds. She played two minutes in both the Final Four and national championship game. "Last year, I didn't think that I would necessarily get to this point. I didn't think that I would even, you know, be able to be in the stands for a national championship game or on the bench for a national championship game and I actually got to dress and sub in. So, it kind of gives me hope that I can keep going," Ducharme said. She knows the best is yet to come. "This is not where I want my story to end," she said. "I can continue to get back to who I was. ... I'm kind of in the mindset of, 'What's stopping me from continuing to improve and continuing to get healthy?' I haven't had this in a while, so to be able to say that, and actually, like, feel good enough to be able to improve and work out and get better and get healthier, just it means a lot from where I've come."