CHICAGO – Many of us live with some form of constant pain that we don’t really know why or where it comes from.

In a Fox 32 Special ReportSylvia Perez shares how a team of northwest suburban surgeons solved this mystery for a local woman and made a new medical breakthrough for others.

“Ever since I was younger, around 15, I’ve had a lot of hip and rib issues,” Lauren Casey said. “I had gone to doctor after doctor and no one had really discovered anything wrong.”

Casey is now in her 20s and says she first felt this pain when she was in high school.

“I loved being in the marching band. I played the tenor saxophone. So I was like a skinny little girl, playing this big instrument,” Casey said. “I just succeeded because everyone told me everything was fine and nothing helped. So what am I supposed to do?”

Over time, the pain spread from Casey’s hip to his rib.

It was only last year that his chiropractor at the time made a big discovery when he discovered the origin of his pain.

“He did an X-ray of my neck, my whole body, but he saw something was wrong with my neck,” she said.

Until then, Casey says her doctors had only taken X-rays from the neck down and not up, because that’s where she felt her pain.

She also says she didn’t feel any neck pain or headache despite how her neck looked on the x-ray.

“If anyone had manipulated that neck, she would be on a ventilator unable to speak, move her arms and legs for the rest of her life,” said Dr. Amin Kassam.

“Lauren is a very kind young lady who suffered from a very rare condition. Her name is basilar intussusception,” added Dr. Russ Nockels.

Dr. Nockels and Dr. Kassam are neurosurgeons at the Endeavor Health Neurosciences Institute Advanced Neuroscience Center in Arlington Heights.

“What can happen is the spine starts to pass through the opening in the skull where the spinal cord is, and that’s a very dangerous situation,” Nockels said.

“I think of it as Chicago traffic. It’s 94. It has a six-lane highway. It has two lanes open. The other four lanes are closed,” Kassam said.

As a result of the compression, doctors told the 23-year-old software engineer that she had the spine of a 60-year-old woman.

Since birth, this curve of her neck also made it difficult for Casey to simply look straight ahead.

The question now remains how to treat this rare disease.

“If you create an environment that allows people to challenge each other, it becomes relatively simple to understand,” Kassam said.

Physicians representing eight surgical specialties and 18 subspecialties make up a group known as the Endeavor Tumor Committee. They meet regularly to develop care plans for patients with complex neurological conditions.

From their analysis of Casey’s case was born a pioneering new surgical approach. It’s based on an existing technique created by one of his surgeons.

“The first time I went through my nose to pull in and remove this piece of bone, as opposed to my mouth, was in the early 2000s,” Kassam said.

Except this time, doctors didn’t want to remove the vertebrae at the top of Casey’s cervical spine. They just want to straighten him and hold him that way so his spinal cord is no longer compressed.

Fox 32 caught up with Dr. Nockels and Kassam in the operating room where they performed this pioneering technique on Casey in January.

By entering through the nose, they did not need to make incisions in the mouth or pull out the tongue.

“She can eat right away because you didn’t disturb anything. Her tongue isn’t swollen,” Kassam said. “She can eat a normal diet. She can stand up. She can talk.”

Once they were able to access his spine, they moved and stabilized the misaligned bone with a few metal screws.

“It was really quite striking. It looked like part of his spine was impaling his spinal cord,” said Dr. Melanie Fukui.

Fukui is the neuroradiologist who helped with Casey’s surgery. She is like a flight navigator, guiding surgeons from one step to the next in the operating room.

“It was just a very unusual case in general and it was a really innovative solution that worked really well for her. I think it was a great result all around,” Fukui said.

“I think it was their belief in themselves that made me so confident that everything was going to be okay,” Casey added.

Despite an intense recovery from surgery that included intubation and wearing different halo devices to immobilize her neck for two months, Casey says she now feels good.

“Everything is green. I’m ready to go. I don’t need to see them or visit them or anything,” she said. “It was a really good experience overall. I couldn’t have asked for better people.”

His doctors hope that Casey’s good experience will also translate into a good experience for other patients in the future.

“I think there are a lot of people in his age group in similar conditions,” Dr. Kassam said. “I think people will be a lot more aware of it and be able to direct them to the right places to get care.”

“The real and unique aspect of this is that we were able to do something that was minimally invasive but maximally effective for her,” Dr. Nockels said.

To perform Casey’s surgery, his doctors had to do it in two parts, with a three-day break in between. Together, both parts required ten hours with approximately four different surgical teams to complete.