WILTIMS #42: A blessed nerve injury

At one point today, our head anatomy professor was up on a table on all fours with oven mitts on his hands and feet. Learning anatomical development is weird.

There was a fun point today where for the first time I learned something that someone had asked me about in the past few years of pre-med purgatory. They had a bump on their wrist and came to me because I was "the medical person" and I had no idea what it was. We made a solid guess based off some internet perusing and forgot about it. Today we covered synovial cysts of the wrist, one of which was in fact the cause of my friend's bump. It's a totally benign condition that can be resolved by, no joke, smacking the wrist really hard to pop the cyst.

TIL: The "anatomical snuff box" (pictured on the upper right on the beautiful hand of yours truly) is a groove on the forearm that received its name by victorian era snuff sniffers who found it a convenient to spot to place snuff while they put away their snuff box.

Injuries to the radial nerve can cause the arm and wrist to assume what's called the "waiter's tip position" (seen on the left).

A median nerve injury can be identified by asking the patient to try to make a fist and then looking for the "hand of benediction" (No, JPII didn't have a nerve injury; he is doing the namesake sign of benediction that happens to perfectly mimic the nerve condition).