Walk with the Weary
– Dr. M. R Rajagopal

Dr, M. R Rajagopal’s ‘Walk with the Weary’, is an autobiography – a memoir packed with stories wrapped around human suffering.
The protagonist is a doctor, who became obsessed with patient suffering even before pain management became a specialty – popularly known today as Palliative Care.
A compilation of shared experiences from his years of walking along the road of illness with people suffering from life-limiting illnesses, the book holds many lessons on living and dying well.
The author has put together stories showcasing love, faith, hope and grief in the backdrop of illness, sharing his own life story on the side.

The story of a young anesthesiologist, who entered the scene of caring armed with persistence and a will to remove the burden of pain from seriously ill patients he passed by on his way to the operation theater, has more drama than one would expect.
The stories are told in a chatty style initially, possibly due to the personal nature of the parts, but changes to a conversational yet ruminative in the latter. Though his palliative care adventure and that of India runs parallel, they blend effortlessly at crucial turning points.

The author unveils a path he curiously staggered into rather intentionally through stories of thirty plus patients who allowed him into their suffering, often trying to relieve pain by trial and error, error being not successful in easing agony.
Some of the patients who stand out are Ramesh, who suffered enormously even after a failed suicide attempt; a college professor who succeeded in taking his own life due to hopelessness; Rahmath who had the saddest smile and the children who taught valuable lessons about accepting the inevitable, refusing the vague and smiling when there was the slightest pain relief.
The author, at times, makes fun of himself, admitting his mistakes, misunderstandings, or misadventures. He is not shy to admit his naive entry into the world of pain relief, or his amateurish attempts at nerve blocking, even before he had a clue that his now specialty palliative care was more than the art and science of relieving illness related suffering.
He names one and all of his fellow travelers, from mentors to colleagues, magnanimous donors to supportive family caregivers.

He acknowledges every doctor, nurse, philanthropist, mentor and patient he met and walked along during his formative years as a palliative care enthusiast and later crusader. Among them Yusuf Hammed, Dr. Robert Twycross, philanthropist Bruce Davice and British nurse Gilli Burn are some of those who the reader will come to admire.
The memoir of this trailblazer doctor works like anesthesia for the reader, allowing one to negotiate the sufferings in some of those stories with ease.
The book advocates the health sector combined science with compassion and made lives livable for people nearing the end of life.
In the writer’s words, “I believe I have a right to a compassionate and responsive medical system that will not reject the human being in me simply because my disease is incurable. I will consider it the greatest outrage on my person if, at that time, I am subjected to the ultimate indignity of a tube in every orifice, the agony of a suction catheter in my lungs and the horror of a friendless, cable-covered, electronic inhumane death.”
He says it is a paradox that people have to protect themselves against the medical system by signing “advance medical directives”.
“Can we not integrate palliative care into all healthcare as recommended by the World Health Assembly in 2014 so as to relieve suffering along with treatment of diseases?” he asks.