In life, short term PAIN is unavoidable, but chronic, long-term PAIN can be managed.  In most cases, PAIN can be managed using pharmaceuticals (which will have side effects).  It some cases PAIN can be managed by physical therapy, massage or acupuncture allowing the body to recover its balance.  In other cases PAIN can be managed by simply listening to the PAIN, to your body, avoiding activities that increase the PAIN and increasing activities that reduce PAIN.   But in some cases PAIN can not be managed at all.  Nothing seems to work in the eternal moment; instead it takes time and during that time you either die from it or you are transformed  by by it.

I learned the difference between PAIN and chronic PAIN after a back injury in 1984.

After pharmaceuticals made the PAIN worst and physical therapy was not available during a recession; I stopped trying to ignore and hide from the PAIN .  I began to swim in the local pool.  Swimming became my religion, my meditation, my spiritual foundation.  It took time.  It took five years of persistent effort, and although I didn't realize it until recently, swimming became part of a lifelong "ecology of practices" that resulted in crackerjack prizes,  transformations and awakenings. 

• John Vervaeke  

Suffering takes time.  Suffering is self actuated.  You do it to yourself.  In theory that's what makes it optional, but in practice that doesn't mean that you can stop.  Suffering takes what has happened and makes it happen again and again and again. 

Suffering takes practice through actual or cognitive repetition; running the tape over and over; experiencing the past injury or anticipated loss again and again.    That doesn't mean that you won't slow down to look at the wreck in the middle of the road.  That could be you and you know it, so you just have to look.