The Hidden Advantage of Keeping a Pain Journal in Your Personal Injury Case in New Jersey

Automobile, slip and fall, burn accidents, and the like can leave a victim in severe pain. When you suffer pain, your only preoccupation is coping with or relieving pain. So, when your neck, shoulders, back, and knees hurt after a rear-end collision in New Jersey, your first order of business is to get relief. After, you may seek compensation from those who caused your injuries. Will you remember the pain’s location, intensity, and sensation weeks or months later when an insurer asks you to describe it? The specific qualities and degree of pain fade over time, even while you remember why you had a painful experience.

Without recording the physical and emotional pain you suffered, you may not be able to paint a vivid picture of your experience when an attorney asks you about it later. For that reason, our personal injury lawyers always advise our clients to keep a pain journal or diary. Writing daily entries about your pain, restrictions, medications, and activities that affect the physical and emotional pain allows you to report your experience when you need to report your injury’s impact. We can use this crucial information to illustrate the full scope of the accident’s impact on your physical and emotional state, as well as how your injuries have affected your ability to maintain and enjoy activities of daily living.

Understanding Pain Journals After Injuries: A Guide to Tracking Your Recovery

A pain journal is a written catalog of everything associated with the pain you experience from an accident someone else caused. Ideally, from the time of the incident, you detail the daily experience of your pain.

Essential Components of Pain Journal Entries

  • You may record when the pain in specific body areas occurs by date and time. So, you write about the day you wake up with neck pain that lasts all day or a few hours in the morning, just late at night, or midday stiffness and pain.
  • Along with the time and duration, you want to identify where you experience pain. For each specific body part or region, you might describe the type of pain, such as dull ache, sharp shooting pain, or throbbing.
  • Also, pain intensity is extremely relevant, so you should measure your pain on a scale of one to ten, depending on where you experience it.
  • It is also helpful to record not only when the pain is worst or least but also the activities that trigger or help alleviate it, specifically noting which activities you can no longer do and which you can without pain.
  • Additionally, you may be taking medication prescribed by a doctor or over-the-counter pain relievers after an accident, noting in your journal which helps and which does not or has side effects. You might also write advice from various healthcare providers about the measures, treatments, or actions that help with the pain.
  • Typical journal entries should include how the pain affects your life, including your sleep, work, and social life. So, when you can no longer get on the floor to play with your grandkids or keep your spot on your recreational baseball team, you want those details in your diary.
  • Naturally, pain takes its emotional toll, and you want to journal about your moods, such as frustration, anger, sadness, and anxiety.   

Enhancing Your Personal Injury Case with Pain Journal Documentation

A pain journal is a powerful support for your claim. It can bolster your credibility and clearly show how an injury impacted your life. Rather than giving vague descriptions of your pain, the details recorded in real-time as the story of your injury unfolds are more precise, more believable, and justifiably compensable in the amount you claim.

You strengthen your case when you are a credible witness as to the extent and duration of your suffering. So, when you can communicate the pain level in quantifiable terms, you can relay how you experienced physical and emotional pain so that others, like insurance adjusters or jury members, can understand it. 

A pain journal is most useful for refreshing your memory about the specific details of your injury, treatment, and experience. This allows your doctors to treat you more effectively and support your claim, your attorneys to understand your case and advocate for you, and insurance adjustors to understand your circumstances and justify settlement amounts.

Moreover, your pain journal corroborates the documentary and expert witness evidence as to your medical treatment. Medical records and expert testimony are significant evidence in proving your case, so a pain journal strengthens your case by increasing the strength of your proof.

Finally, a diary helps you undermine the defense. In most personal injury cases, the defense seeks to discredit the evidence and minimize your injury severity as exaggerated or inaccurate. Refuting the defense’s claims with a careful, honest, and accurate pain diary weakens and discredits the opposition’s stance.

Fundamentals of Writing Strong and Effective Pain Journal Entries

A pain journal is most informative when the entries are consistent, specific, detailed, honest, and accurate. The more you put into the journal, the more persuasive it is.

Be Consistent:

Consistent entries are key to an effective pain diary. It is important to write in it daily or as frequently as possible to paint the clearest picture of your experience and the extent of your suffering, treatment, and recovery.

Be Specific and Detailed:

The more specific and detailed the entries, the better. Using pinpoint adjectives for physical and mental pain at different times and in various body areas creates palpable visuals and sensations for a reader’s understanding of what you experienced. Describe the bodily sensations while you go about your daily activities in depth and express your mental and emotional state freely.

Use a Pain Scale:

Without exaggeration or deception, write a truthful account of your pain journey. Matter-of-fact details of how, why, and when your pain increased, decreased, or persisted are more convincing and valuable to you than dramatic representations of your actual pain. Your credibility depends on it. The defense aims to discredit you with exaggerations and untruths, and it only takes one false entry to make your claim doubtful in a jury’s mind. Accuracy is crucial, too, so using a comprehensible scale can convey your pain experience to others who cannot precisely know what occurred inside you. Most people understand a pain scale of one to ten, ten being the highest pain level.

Keep it Confidential:

Finally, preserve and safeguard your journal so it is available when you need it, months or years later. Locking it away in a safe or safety deposit box ensures you have it as evidence and a reminder when you need it.

Leveraging a Pain Journal Throughout the Personal Injury Legal Process

The greatest value of a pain journal is how your attorney uses it to build your case.

Adding a Human Dimension to Your Claim

Your legal team can collect all your medical records and find a medical expert to testify to the extent, nature, and effect of your injuries, but the pain journal adds the human dimension to the equation. Making your pain real, tangible, and relatable for others helps your attorney convince adjusters in settlement negotiations and juries at trials.

Preparing for Defense Questions With Your Pain Journal

As an effective memory jogger, the journal can also help you answer the defense’s questions about your pain. Their aim is to make you look unreliable when you forget details or contradict yourself. Having your journal to review before questioning is essential to avoid mistakes.

The Legal Value of Your Journal in Documenting Your Experience for the Court

In the end, your journal may be evidence of your pain and suffering should your case go to trial. A jury can review the journal to support your damages claim.

The Role of Pain Journals After Accident Injuries in NJ

Thus, if you have been in an injury accident, you could significantly help your claim for damages compensation with a pain journal. As soon as possible, begin the chronicle of your pain journey and contact a personal injury attorney to help you build your case.

Take Control of Your Injury Case with a Pain Journal and Talk to our New Jersey Legal Team Today

Once you consult with our experienced New Jersey personal injury attorneys, you will understand the role of your pain journal in getting the most complete compensatory award in a settlement or jury verdict. Our team at Cohen & Riechelson understands the value of a well-documented living-with-pain experience to draw a proper portrait of the harm you have been forced to endure. A jury sympathetic to your case is more inclined to give you more financial support, especially when you make them feel what you went through day by day. Likewise, insurers know that personal injury cases go to a jury if settlement efforts fail, so they evaluate the strength of the evidence in a jury’s eyes when deciding the amount to settle a case.

When you have a detailed pain journal that would turn the jurors’ minds toward your suffering, the insurance company may be willing to come to a negotiated settlement that best serves your needs. Either way, our skilled personal injury lawyers can advise and instruct you on how to prepare, keep, and use a pain journal to boost your case and use it as a tool for negotiation and litigation. We proudly serve clients seeking legal support for their personal injury cases in West Windsor, Ewing, Robbinsville, Pennington, Medford, Willingboro, Edison, Piscataway, Voorhees, Haddonfield, Burlington Township, and throughout New Jersey. Call us today at (609) 528-2596 for a free consultation, or contact us via our convenient form to get your case started.