Tips For Creating A Personal Injury Journal
If you are the victim of an accident that was caused by another person, you need to be prepared to document your injury for a potential lawsuit. This means starting a personal injury journal so that you can properly recall what your injury was like during your recovery. Here are a few tips for creating a basic personal injury journal that will get the job done.
Make It Easy To Update
It's important that your injury journal is easy to update so that you do it frequently. If you are the type of person that uses their phone for everything, making a journal on your desktop computer that you need to fire up may not be the best idea. The easier it is to update the more likely you are to do it.
Take Photographs
The saying that a picture is worth a thousand words has never been more true than in a personal injury case. Photos are a great way to represent how an injury is healing, but it must be done properly. Try to take photos at consistent intervals and in the same lighting conditions. You may even want to make it a habit to take a daily photo at the start of an injury. For example, if you have bruises on your body, you may want to take that photo every morning in your bathroom in bright lighting conditions.
Create A Pain Scale
It's also important to rate your pain on a scale of 1–10 when you make a journal entry. This is because it can be difficult to remember how painful an injury was when you are trying to recall it months or years later in a lawsuit. Some people even like to write a sentence or two to accompany the number rating so they have a better idea about what it means.
In addition, it can also help to use a diagram of the outline of a body to show where you are experiencing pain if it's in multiple areas. You can place the numbers on the diagram to quickly identify what areas are hurting the most.
Log Your Medications
If you are taking medications that can help with recovery or mask the pain, it's important to log those as well in your journal. A pain reliever can definitely make your pain feel better than it actually feels, which is lowering the number you're logging for each entry.
Contact a personal injury lawyer to learn more.