Unlimited Oppai Works

It's just another regular breast tissue to process at work. It's uncommon to get these delivered to the histopath department still fresh on the outside. Most would have been bathed in formalin and hardened for hours prior being sent to the lab.

Just sharing some pics about the usual stuff at work.

They are as bouncy as you can imagine but cold. I think I've had enough muscle memory acquired to distinguish between young boobies and old boobies without looking. Young ones tend to be a bit more firmer even when fresh (unless taken from an obese patient). But this is just my bias as the normal ones would probably be a little bit different from the diseased ones I get to process.

I wanted to hasten the preservation process so I had to cut up the specimen for the formalin to fill in. The problem with letting these soak in formalin without mechanical intervention is that only the outside surfaces get more preserved. If the tumor is within and not get fixed in time, the receptors die and this affects how they stain for prognostic reasons.

Staining those receptors matter a lot even with just a few subjective point difference because the outlook of chemotherapy will be different. It's one of those situations where the minute details of what you do can become a butterfly effect on someone else's life.

This one had a small lump that would be more pronounced once the formalin sets in and I'll be able to delineate the borders. It was diagnosed as a case of invasive breast carcinoma on core needle.

What if because I failed to preserve the specimen on time that the stains don't stick and this gives a false signal during interpretation? It's the small things.

If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time.

Posted with STEMGeeks