Section 1  Pain and suffering
I once knew a woman whose son was playing in the yard when a
neighbor kid shot him in the heart with a BB gun. He didn’t die, but his brain starved for lack of oxygen and his parents have since cared for him at home as a complete invalid. This woman and I were jogging as she told me her story, our healthy morning run surprising me yet again with the way we carry on in spite of ourselves. “What do people say to you?” I wondered. “You must sometimes feel like you don’t live on the same planet.” We jogged on in silence and I thought maybe she wasn’t going to answer. But suddenly she stopped short and lifted the visor of her baseball cap to look me in the eye. “Once a man said: ‘I thank you every day for reminding me how lucky I am.’ That was the worst.” I could see that she would not want to be so useful to others, to have her pain so handy, like a corkscrew or a pair of good boots, for someone else to walk off in.
The purpose of this section is to distinguish between pain and suffering and to articulate the difference in treatment approach
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