Experimental Surgery Blocks Migraine Pain

April 14 -- Marcey Sullivan of South Bend, Ind., has had little interaction with her two young children. Almost every day for the last four years Sullivan has been bedridden with searing headaches called chronic migraine syndrome.

"I would describe it as a dagger," she told ABCNEWS. "I just had a throbbing dagger sensation like someone kept pushing it in there, again and again."

Sullivan, 35, tried the most powerful pain medications, even morphine patches.

"Not only did they have terrible side effects," she said, "but they didn't work. I still had a headache and I was bombed. I didn't remember anything."

With nowhere else to turn, Sullivan recently tried an experimental treatment. Doctors at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago implanted tiny electrodes in her head to block the pain.

The electrodes were inserted just under the skin over Sullivan's left eye where her migraines usually begin. A connecting wire was then tunneled under her skin, around her ear and down her neck, to a small battery pack implanted just under her collarbone.

Electronic pulses then began to stimulate nerve cells, in effect "distracting" the nerves and disrupting pain signals to the brain.

"We're activating the fibers in the nerve that sort of compete against the pain fibers," Dr. Robert Levy, a neurosurgeon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital told ABCNEWS. "So the stimulation we use blocks pain."

To be effective, said Levy, the patient must be able to control the number and intensity of the pulses — enough to relieve pain but not enough to be uncomfortable.

Sullivan was given a remote control she can adjust through the day. Most of the time she leaves it set at 45 pulses a second.