Everyone has heard the term “pain and suffering” associated with damages in a lawsuit. Many people discount the legitimacy of such damages and consider them overblown or exaggerated. This suspicion of “pain and suffering” appears to exist until you are injured, until you are thrown into a world of hurt and until your world is turned upside down. Because pain and suffering is difficult to prove it does not mean that it does not exist.
For example, many people believe in god but no-one has ever seen the Divine.
Pain and suffering comprises both physical pain and emotional pain. Let’s see if we can describe what it feels like to be in constant, severe and unremitting pain:
the worst of hells is continuous pain; hell is continuous suffering;
pain and suffering shrinks your life; pain reduces your reality.
if life is a river you stay on the shore in the same place as when you were injured.
life continues in its normal flow without you.
you are disconnected from yourself, other people and the life you knew.
your identity is snatched away from you and you are in solitary confinement with yourself.
says the Buddah; he who is in perpetual hell never dies even if he wants to die.
infinite suffering for infinity.
constant unrelenting pain, every instant and for every second without relief with only death being able to relieve the pain.
“they shoot horses don’t they” to relieve their suffering.
the pain scours you.
it strips you of your self-respect.
it makes a coward out of you.
it debases you.
it makes you feel ashamed of yourself.
It, the pain, robs you of your hopes and dreams.
There is not enough money in the world to balance the scales of life to endure this pain and suffering. It is your reality from the moment you open your eyes in the morning to the time you struggle at night to close them.
These are some of the reasons that pain and suffering are part of the damages considered by juries in personal injury cases.
Arthur F. Licata
Tags: personal injury; lawsuit; damges, what is pain and suffering; physical pain and emotional pain.
About-the-law 
November 19, 2011 at 1:49 am |
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