mellicious | Word of the day

Heberden nodes
small, hard nodules formed in the cartilage of the distal joints of the fingers in osteoarthritis

I've finished working my way through the chapters on the muscles and skeleton in the Medical Terminology book, but there's no way I'm ready to take the test right now (I nearly said "take the quest" - too much MMORPGing!) so I'm working my way through the same chapters in the Anatomy book now, hoping that will help. It's all straightened itself out in my head a lot, but not everything has stuck yet, so it needs some more work. I'm not having any more trouble with the names of muscles and bones than I am with with names of diseases. Things like the difference between all the different forms of bone cancer were stumping me until I finally spotted a pattern - if it's just "-oma" it's not so bad, but if it's "-sarcoma" look out. So an osteoma is benign and so is a chondroma (which is in the cartilage) or even an osteochondroma (both bone and cartilage), but an osteosarcoma is malignant. This doesn't always work for other cancers (myeloma, for example) but it seems to for this bunch.

(I know the icon is awfully busy but I like it. At least it doesn't actually blink.)