one year of arm stuff – part 3 – what the heck is a radial nerve?

The radial nerve runs from your shoulder down to your fingers along the outside of your upper arm and the top of your lower arm, about where you might get a sunburn or where you would draw body hair on a cartoon character. It powers a lot of muscles related to extension – straightining (and going past straight) – of your fingers, thumb and wrist, and doing some rotation and stabilization on the elbow. Below the elbow it contributes to sensation and feeling along the top of your forearm and the back of your hand and fingers. When you type, it helps you lift your wrist and fingers; when you reach out to grab a can of pop it opens your palm and gets all your digits out of the way; when you attempt to use force of any kind with your hand, it contributes to grip strength, wrist stabilization, elbow leverage, etc.

Mine grew a little flattened ovoid mass right below where you might picture an anchor tattoo on Popeye.

Which is coincidentally right where I have an anchor tattoo.

But they really don’t think my 14 year old tattoo caused this. The radial nerve is under more than half an inch of muscle there; that tattoo would have had to get extremely, catastrophically infected for damage to reach that far down, and as far as I remember it healed very smoothly with no complications whatsoever.

But the surgeon did take a lot of care not to fuck up the tattoo too bad both times he went in through it for surgery.