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EDMONTON - John Brown knows pain like a nail knows a hammer.
The 33-year-old clerk was bludgeoned over the head with a dry-wall hammer by a thief at a west-end liquor store Jan. 10, left for dead as the man made away with liquor and money.
A week later and just three days out of hospital, Brown sat slumped on his couch at his overcrowded townhouse in west Edmonton.
His wife at his side and his five kids playing around the house, he recounted a horror he had never known.
"I tried grabbing his wrists, but he twisted out," said Brown.
Next thing, the world went black.
A strange man had just barged into his store and around Brown's counter. He pulled out a dry-wall hammer and raised it overhead without saying a word to Brown.
"Instant blackness," he said.
When Brown regained consciousness, he was paralysed, still sitting in the chair where he rested before the attack, drinking coffee.
"I was on pins and needles. Things were going fuzzy."
But brown could hear his attacker rummaging furiously behind the counter.
"He kept repeating, 'where's the money, where's the money?'"
When John didn't respond - he was still unable to speak -the thug smashed his leg with the hammer.
"I was thinking, and you expect me to answer how?" said Brown.
When Brown didn't respond again, the thief grabbed Brown's own coffee cup and smashed it into Brown's face.
"When he attacked, it felt like forever - like everything was in slow motion," he said.
It was a horror he's never known, he said.
Doctors later told Brown he was clubbed so hard over the head that a fragment of his skull was driven into his brain, threatening to sever a main vein.
The chip remains in Brown's head - doctors are too scared of a massive haemorrhage to operate.
He now lives under threat of unpredictable seizures.
He hasn't had one yet, but the headaches have been relentless.
"It kind of feels like someone swiped a hammer over my head," he said, laughing.
Just Friday, his wife Skye rushed him to hospital at 2 a.m. because of severe head pain. She has been left to handle the couple's five children, ranging in age from three to 11, by herself while coping with her own debilitating back problems from a car wreck eight years ago. Worse yet, the couple said their youngest child has been particularly disturbed by the attack.
After reading Richard Scarry's Busy Town, the three-year-old said "Bad man hit daddy over the head with hammer," according to Skye. Brown said he's not sure when he'll be able to get back to work. He is the sole breadwinner of the home, with Skye off work since her car accident.
Employees of the Jasper Place Hotel, site of the attack, have set up a donation fund accessible through any Servus Credit Union - account number 5328430.
A fundraiser will be held at the hotel Jan. 25.