St. Mary's Medical Center got a tip of the hat care of VH1's Best Week Ever blog. For what, exactly? Why, for acting like Dr. Frankenstein and slicing off carpenter Garrett La Fever's big toe and reattaching it as his thumb. According to to ABC 7: The thumb is responsible for 40 percent of the function of the hand which is why when doctors proposed removing Garrett's big toe and using it to create......

Sure, it's not SF-related but it's world-related as far as we're concerned. Scratch that, it's soul-related. Alex Trebek, 67, suffered a mild heart attack last night. But! He's in OK condition. The attack was considered minor, and he's being treated at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and expected to make a full recovery. Still: say a little prayer for Trebek, won't you? We love us some Jeopardy!, watch it nightly, and only call out the questions......

By day he's an Alight Electric employee. By night? A Ford F-350 Super Duty hero. It seems that last night on the Golden Gate Bridge, John Beatty of Mill Valley saved the day, so to speak, after noticing a woman unconscious in her Jeep, moving into oncoming traffic. At around 6:50 p.m., Sylvia Durrance, 62, came to a stop while driving southbound in the No. 2 lane. She appeared lifeless, her body slumped over......

A manhunt is underway right now at Contra Costa College, searching for a man who shot a Contra Costa College student police cadet three times at close range a little before 1 p.m. today. "The victim was in critical condition when he was taken to John Muir Medical Center...[and] has since been stabilized and has gone into surgery," according to CBS 5. As of now, a whopping 50 police officers from five different police......

Thanks to some ass-kicking by Matthew Bajko at the BAR, Bevan's taking a bit more time this year to plan for Halloween. Next public meeting: Wednesday, the 30th, at 5:30 in the California Pacific Medical Center, Davies Campus, in the Level B Auditorium in the North Tower Building. Is it just us, or do those directions sound like riddles in a scavenger hunt? Anyway, they'll be talking about the city's plan for moving Halloween......

We've got mad science going on in the city by the bay. Sometimes it gets acknowledged. Michael Weiner, MD, a professor of radiology, medicine, psychiatry, and neurology at UCSF, has won the VA's most prestigious bio-science prize, the William S. Middleton Award. Weiner, who is also the director of the Center for the Imaging of Neurodegenerative Diseases at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, will receive $150,000 over three years to support his research,......

In the wake of the horrible Walter Reed National Army Medical Center scandal in Washington, we asked ourselves what we could do to make a difference for wounded veterans here in San Francisco. Here's how: we've got Veterans Affairs hospitals of our own in the city....

A photo of S.F. Mayor Newsom at UCSF children's hospital...

SFist Reader Caitlin poses the same question many of us have asked: "Why does Muni seem to have fewer (and, therefore, packed) buses running than scheduled?" And we're sure the problems Caitlin describes aren't restricted to the 43. Is there anyone who can help us understand why we all seem to be seeing fewer, more crowded buses? How hard can it be to figure out what the busy lines are? For weeks now, I've seen......

Some time ago, we met Steve Ford, who, among other things pulls a great shot of espresso. We met him during his tenure with the stalkerriffic Blue Bottle Coffee Company; since our encounter, he's moved onto another coffee-related venture as a roaster at Ecco Caffe in Santa Rosa. Steve recently had a not-so-pleasant experience--he fell out the third-story window of the Burlington Hotel in Port Costa, Calif. ...

Lacrosse players! Two members of the San Jose Stealth suffered minor stab wounds after getting in a bar fight outside the Britannia Arms pub. The players said someone spit in their face, and then as they tried to leave the bar, they got jumped by a group of 8 guys. We had no idea there even were professional lacrosse players, let alone a team in the area! Sketch of suspect here. Our favorite flavor: schadenfreunde. Two guys bust into a Benicia bank wearing ski masks and brandishing semi-automatics. "Get down on the floor! Give us your money!" Well, it turns out the bank was actually a credit union, where all the money is immediately deposited into a huge locked vault that none of the employees know how to open. The robbers were forced to leave without any cash, and were then promptly arrested outside. And the authorities are looking for a confused 60-year-old woman who was discharged by herself around 5:30 a.m. Monday monring from the San Mateo Medical Center and became lost. The woman suffers from Alzheimer's and seizures. Her family is unhappy with the hospital for not calling a relative to come pick her up. Meanwhile, the woman was seen on Wednesday in Pacifica by her childhood home, asking when her father got home. Later that day, she was seen in the Mission, where a homeless-shelter driver picked her up and gave her something to eat in the Tenderloin. Elysse McCormick is 5'2", 118 pounds, with hazel eyes, straight shoulder-length brown hair, and was last seen wearing black sweats. She may have on glasses as well. If you have any information, call the San Mateo PD at 650-522-7650. ...

Your occasional roundup of protests around the Bay. Photoblogger Thomas Hawk passed along this gorgeous shot of ferry workers protesting the National Park Service's decision to launch a ferry service to Alcatraz with anti-union Hornblower Yachts. Go to the Indybay site and check out their pictures of the ferry drill team! Extra bonus: Frank Chu in the background. Two strikers outside Eden Medical Center in Castro Valley were injured in protests today -- one striker was pepper-sprayed and another struck by a car. The strikers claim that the injuries were caused by security workers, but the hospital claims that a cleaning woman trying to get to work was the pepper-sprayer (but say nothing about the getting hit by a car thing.) No one was injured enough to need to go to (presumably another) hospital, though. And SF children's advocates rallied outside City Hall yesterday, with suitcases as props, to protest how San Francisco pressures middle class families to move out. Only 14.5% of the city is under 18 (from 25% in 1960. Children make up 27% of the state), 62% of families leaving the city are poor or middle-class, and 64% of families leaving SF are families of color. Picture of the ferry workers by Thomas Hawk...

Thanks to Engadget, who reads CNet News, who read Matier and Ross (we've given up), we find out that Waldo, a medicine-delivering helper robot at the UCSF Medical Center went bonkers, zooming down a hall into a treatment room and scaring the living daylights out of a patient with cancer (which is saying something, since once you have cancer, what the hell else is there to be afraid of, really?): At the end of......

Cares is back and more shallow than ever. SFist knows our readers are already super cute. But we'd be remiss if we didn't let you know how to get cuter and help a good cause at the same time. This Saturday Herrero | Martenson DDS will be offering half price ($250) on teeth whitening treatment as part of the 6th Annual Smile for the Cure. Okay, yeah, that's a bit shallow for Cares but......

Alta Bates Summit nurses and other staffers went on a one-day strike and got locked out instead for a week....

Sutter Health faces possible loss of accreditation....