watch your fingers!

i love my limbs. and i love my digits. all 20 of them.
why the sudden appreciation?
we had this brutal lecture (there's really no other way to describe it. brutal. just brutal!) on friday afternoon about reconstructive surgery with a special focus on the hands and fingers.
it was one of those lectures where some of the technical content was beyond our current knowledge but it was interesting as heck.
the guest lecturer had a steady supply of freak accidents and gruesome pictures to match. something that really caught my attention was a toe-transfer. in this one case, a patient had lost his thumb. seeing as how important the thumb is for our daily functioning, they removed the second toe from his right foot and attached it to where his thumb was. fortunately for this patient, it was possible because most of the nerves and blood vessels of the hand that supply the thumb were still in pretty good shape. so now he has a second toe for a thumb. sure it looks a little odd, but in terms of function, it's heaps better than having no thumb.

be good to your digits.

our second lecture yesterday was on the cranial nerves and what happens when they are injured. cranial nerve IV got me thinking... cranial nerve IV (the trochlear nerve) is important for eye movement. in particular, it plays a key role in the movement of the eye in the lateral plane (side to side) when the eye turned inferiorly (looking down). damage to the trochlear nerve results in the loss of this control. this leads to double vision. however, patients will soon learn that if they tilt their head down and towards their good eye, this will help with the visual problems. so. i wonder if horatio caine, the detective in CSI: Miami suffers from trochlear nerve damage...