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Chase Delome Rowan and his family were on a Caribbean island for a family holiday and were there to celebrate his birthday
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Not many people can say they can actually feel their brain.
Chase Delome Rowan can even be seen pulsating.
The 18-year-old lifts his curly brown hair and flashes a long red scar on his right side of his head, above his ears, where his skull is gone.
The missing bone fragment leaves a dent in the area where the skin is drooping down on his brain, rubbing it and sometimes tickling it.
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“It’s itchy. It could hurt my brain. You know. It’s hard to explain,” Delorme Rowan said in an interview at his Edmonton home.
The skull section was removed and thrown out by a doctor who performed brain surgery in the Dominican Republic in January. His skull was cracked from top to bottom in an attack at a nightclub at Punta Cana Resort.
Delorme-Rowan said he doesn’t remember most of the night.
His family was on a Caribbean island for a family holiday and celebrated his 18th birthday. He and his brother went to the club on January 14th.
“I went out for smoke, then I went back and sat down and it just turned black.”
He later said he learned he was lifted up by the collar of his shirt, shaking, then slammed on the head, slamming him onto the tile floor.
A Canadian man who was also a guest at the resort was charged with assault causing physical harm.
After the attack, the grapefruit-sized blood clot formed inside Delorma Rowan’s skull, shifting his brain slightly to the right. The doctor had to remove a portion of the skull to reach the clot and give it a swollen brain room to recover and stop the bleeding, the mother said.
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His skull remained open for five days, and the surgeon sewed him in without sewing.
Almost three weeks later, Delorme Rowan, still in coma, was taken to Edmonton Hospital with his mother.
When he first woke up in February, he said that the right side of his brain had been deprived of too much oxygen, so he couldn’t stop him from burning his right arm and legs.
His left arm was paralyzed.
The doctors taught him how to use his arms again and how to walk, talk, eat and drink.
Cindy Rowan said her son struggles most with drinking water.
“I didn’t know how to relax the throat muscles so I continued to get into my lungs,” she said while sitting on the couch in the living room.
In March he is discharged from the hospital and returns home, where he uses strength training and stretch bands on stack coins to increase hand and eye adjustments.
“I still have a hard time tying my shoes and stuff,” he said.
His girlfriend visits frequently. He also loves to eat a lot of “everything” because he lost 40 pounds in coma.
The doctor is due to fill the hole in his skull with titanium or plastic later this month.
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While he waits, he puts on his helmet every time he stands up or moves around.
“If I hit a place where my skull is missing, I could die.”
He said he has learned a lot of lessons over the past few months and is trying to avoid sticking to attacks.
“I wake up every day and I’m grateful that I’m still here because I might have passed away,” he said with a smile.
“I’ve started to cherish all the little things. Just sitting here… I’m happy.”
He also takes pride in all the progress he has made in his recovery, he said. He hopes that those who hurt him will be taken to justice and wonders why the accusation is not an attempted murder.
His mother said he didn’t know when the accused would be in court.
For now, her family said she is focused on her son’s recovery.
But Delorme-Rowan said he hopes for the future. He hopes to become a photographer one day.
And he says he misses starting a post-secondary school and interacting with friends, but he is still out for appointments.
He said he was in his PhD recently and someone had started talking to him.
“We met a woman who recognized me in the news,” he said. “After I got home, my life was just uphill.”
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