2026 April 18 RIC-NYC

MAP OF SAVED LOCATIONS: aka - the options

Starting this to keep Family up to date without endless texts that one relative despises. 

I’ve showed up early, I was at the station before the pick up time   Southeast Asian driver at best guess  only got slightly lost at WC. 5 out 5 stars.  

My bid for Business Class was accepted, so when the train was delayed by a car on the tracks at Main St  (Way to go RVA  although the 757 cars do the same thing with tunnels.) did not have to stay in line for a good seat.   

Yesterday, patient finished at 4:15, I sat down to sign a few things and when I looked up it was 4:48.  I raced out of the office, taking my stethoscope and head lamp with me.  64 was 64, got diverted off to Route 60 - Old Richmond Hwy - but getting on past the blockage in Bottoms Bridge it was clear sailing to RVA.  My older cousins went off to their cocktail party and I got to hang with my younger cousin.

We alternated between doing her puzzle and sorting and re-packing the car.  At 7:47 I realized I had forgotten my computer.  Driving back to Gloucester would have been 2.5-3 hours, woken up Lynda AND Gi, and I wasn't entirely sure it was at home and not in the office.  Can't get into the office after hours.

Luckily there is one Walmart open after 8PM on Friday - and it's the one near Westminister Canterbury.  My sainted cousin drove me out there (car is spending the week with cousin #2), despite what it said on the website - and on the manager's stock list, my first two choices were not available.  So this is what he found:

It was larger, heavier, and cheaper than the other options.  It works fine for what I need it for which is catching up on paperwork and surfing the net.  Learning a new oS is probably good for the brain.  Trying to decide if it is evil to return it, I'd have kept my first choice for sure, but this doesn't have a touch screen - both my work and home lap top do.  In the end it was relatively inexpensive and I could gift it to someone.

Saturday 12:13 PM , East Brunswick, NJ

We've made up time and are expected on-time.  About to stop in my favorite town, East Brunswick, NJ.  I have spent many a night at the Motel 6 there on my way between VA and ME. (12:36 PM - we are now delayed 15 minutes.)

I have ordered lunch for pick up.  It's Boqueria, 10 minute walk from Penn Station, on the way to the hostel.  I can't check in until 3 pm.  So after eating my leisurely lunch in Bryant Park - I will catch the #1 Train, AKA the 7th Avenue Local, FKA the IRT.

We are going to spend a lot of time on the 7th Avenue Subway over the next week.

Bryant Park lost out to Frederick Douglas. One short block vs two long. 

I came out of the Patrick Moynihan Train Hall (Penn Station), 

walked by Madison Square Garden (also Penn Station) and went under a third building, also Penn Station. 

FYI Mom: 

Frederick lost out to the bench in the middle of Broadway. 

Walked the wrong way, then back, and arrived at the Hostel. 

Room is not ready, no rooms are ready. So charging then off

To the Museum of New York City the. To a show. 

Museum of the City

https://www.hurleysnyc.com/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Broadway/comments/1qfqekg/two_strangers_carry_a_cake_across_new_york_review/

New Yawk.  People In New York have Lower rates of Obesity than the national Average. There’s a reason for that. 

TAXES

0-30,000	0%
30-60000	10%
60001-90000	25%
90001-120000	33%
120001-183000	50%
183001 +	33%

No deductions, none.  I'm not attached to the brackets, I just kind of threw it together, but given that I paid a higher effective rate than Mitt Romney the year he ran for president, I would like to see it be fairer.

Updated 10 years later: that wouldn’t work. It would have to be a wealth tax. Lower Mil rate, but on EVERYTHING. 

Email to Senator Heller, copied to Murkowski and Collins

Sir, having watched your statement on the current proposition I wanted to reach out.  I  live in Virginia, but spent most of my life in Maine.  I voted for a number of Republicans in the past, I voted for Senator Collins in 1996 and again in 2002.

The current republican party seems to be in service to the rich, the Russians and the racists.  To value smaller government does require this.  I have probably become a Roosevelt Democrat and will rarely again vote Republican, but there should be a dynamic tension between those who wish to expand government services and oversight and those who wish to constrain it.

I'm a supervising physician in a public health clinic and I tell the clinicians and the accountants, that if either group gets everything they want, we're doing something wrong.  I feel the same way about government.

If you believe that the goal of government is to serve the people, would you consider reaching out to Collins, Murkowski and a few of the others who seem like reasonable folks and forming a new party?  Caucus with the Republicans, but give yourselves a chance to set a new platform?

Fixing American healthcare requires regulation and price setting, I don't think single payer would suit us as a country, but I suspect that will be where we go if the Senate passes this bill.  After 10-20 years of misery for a lot of folks.  All payer rate setting (including pharma), a public option in rural areas and nation wide medicaid expansion would preserve the majority of the current system intact and probably cost less.  A few very rich people would make a bit less, but everyone would have more.

Respectfully,
W.W. Weaves, MD

Pro-choice and Pro-life

I describe myself as both pro-choice and pro-life. 

Sometimes I have described myself as anti-legislation, but that doesn‘t encompass the fullness of my position.  I am also anti-demonstrations out side of clinics, anti-shaming of women for the choices they make, anti-ignorance, anti-abstinence only education, and anti-forced birth.  I'm also very pro contraception.

Edward Snowden

This is not intended to be in anyway comprehensive, just quick thoughts:

1. As an American I would like to get Snowden out of Russia.  Both for his sake and ours.
2. I think he needs to do some jail time.  Not hardcore, but some.  
3. For absolutely no logical reason I've decide 3 years, low security is about right.
4. I wish he and Obama had worked out a deal before the election.  I'd rather have him back.

Always Relevant

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/free_speech.png

Work hours for Interns

There's a lot of uproar about the fact that the maximum shift for first year residents (interns) has been extended to 24 hours again.  I was an intern twice (don't ask) and worked first under no restrictions and then under the 80 hour work week.  I had a variety of chief residents who fiddled the schedule in various ways.

I did a number of 36 hour shifts, they suck.  Unless you are one of those people who is wired that way, they are complete misery.  I found out later that a lot of my fellow residents used adderall to get through.

Twenty-four hours, when you were done at morning sign out, was not that bad.  You had a whole day, often during the workweek, to use as you wanted.  I tended to spend the morning in the hospital finishing up paperwork, left at noon as directed and went home, did laundry and went to bed at 7 or 8  pm and slept through to the next morning.  If the night had been horrible, I would go straight home, shower, put on my jammies, sleep if I could and work on catching up medical records via a Virtual Private network in to the hospital computer system.  (I LOVED that, from my standpoint it was the best invention ever.)

What I hated was having call, and then being assigned the next morning do cover something, a surgery or the floor on patients I didn't know.  It is one thing to be dog tired and delivering a baby after getting to know the woman all night, another to have to hang around for a stranger because there's no one else.  It was being allowed to stay for something you wanted to do, versus being forced.

Hand-offs are their own kind of danger.  Hand-offs create more problems at the lower (less experienced) levels.  There was a study on this in JAMA, I'm not going to go find it.  I read it during my semi-annual CME binge.  For senior residents, sleep may be more important than familiarity.  For juniors, this may not be true.  As someone who does only office work now, my middle of the night phone calls are non-existent.  But for a few years I worked in a general clinic where I took the middle of the night calls from my patients.  These were relatively few, and always on point.  Because I knew the patients well I could triage between "go to the ER" and "Be at the office at 8am," pretty easily.

I found a certain amount of value in the learning I did when bone tired.  I learned that I prefer to do my thinking ahead of time and I develop routines and workflows that keep me from missing things.  This still serves me well, even as I get a full night sleep every night.

I think there is a possibility that period 24 hour shifts are NOT the problem.  That the problem is frequency of them, and the casual disregard of people's health the rest of the time.  I really enjoyed a Q6 call schedule, and still kind of miss it.