It is often a good idea to keep a ‘pain diary’ or ‘pain journal’ following an accident such as a motor vehicle collision or a slip and fall.
A pain diary, like its name suggests, is a record of your daily activities along with any discomfort or pain felt during those activities. A pain diary should also include treatment sessions and other medical care you receive so that it’s clear what impact the treatment has on your well-being. Just a few brief notes every day can be very helpful for your personal injury claim and your recovery process.
A pain diary is a record of the pain and suffering you’re experiencing due to an accident. It can provide support for the pain and suffering component of your personal injury claim. It highlights how an accident has affected your life.
Your pain diary will point to those activities that you used to do on a regular basis but which are now difficult or impossible to do. You might not even realize how much your life has been impacted without the use of a pain diary.
If you must curtail certain activities, such as mowing the lawn, and have to pay someone else to do it, that’s an additional expense for which your personal injury lawyer can seek compensation. A pain diary can be a wealth of helpful information to your personal injury lawyer as he or she seeks to determine the position that you would have been in had the accident not occurred.
A pain diary doesn’t just assist the work of your personal injury lawyer. It also assists your doctor and other medical professionals and therapists. In fact, medical professionals often ask their patients to keep a pain diary.
A pain diary will aid your memory in describing symptoms to your doctor. Your doctor and therapists may also notice patterns in the symptoms that you miss, such as the nature of activities that cause pain or the time of day at which those symptoms occur.
If you are unsure how much detail to include in your pain journal, or what items to include or exclude, ask your personal injury lawyer.
