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Injured? Start Keeping A Journal Of Your Recovery

by Gene Vasquez

If you were injured and required a trip to the hospital, chances are that your injuries are significant and you are starting the process of filing a personal injury lawsuit. However, that lawsuit may take quite some time to happen. By the time you go to court or enter mediation, months or years can pass from when the injury happened. Are you going to remember the recovery process to recall how you are feeling? Probably not. That's why it's important to keep a journal of your recovery. This is how you should make a successful injury journal.

Make A Template

The first thing you should do is make a template that you can photocopy, then hole punch them all and place them in a 3-ring binder. This will make it very easy to document your recovery journey on a regular basis. 

Each page should include a diagram of the outline of a body so that you can easily identify places that are causing you pain. You can use letters to identify each place to keep track of them from day to day. For example, if you are having knee pain you can label it as pain point A, which is different from neck pain labeled as pain point B. Next to the body diagram you should list each pain point and rate it on a scale of 0 to 10 in areas such as pain and range of motion. This will help you keep track if each area is getting better or worse over time. 

In addition, create a section for the medications that you are taking so that you can keep track of if medication has increased or decreased to deal with your discomfort. 

Make Regular Entries

It is important that you make entries in your injury journal on a regular basis. At first your journal entries are likely to happen every single day as the injury is new and changing frequently. However, you'll likely want to make journal entries less often as there are fewer changes between days. When the injury gets to that point, make sure to pick a day each week to make a regular entry. It may be a good idea to pick a day like Sunday so that you remember to do it at the beginning of every week. Regular entries will make it easier to compare the injury to the previous entry when it is fresh in your mind.

Reach out to a personal injury lawyer like Todd East Attorney at Law for more ideas about how to preserve evidence for a case. 

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