[Histonet] Hello everyone, I am new to this forum

[Valerie Rodriguez]

Val, the life is very funny.
I graduated in Chemical Engineering at the University of Pisa. I'm Italian.
I worked in a mechanical company: Fiat.
Since I was 15teen my greater hobby was the microscope. Now I am a pensioner
and my hobby goes on with Histology.
On FaceBook (FB) I have a lot of histologist friends.
If you join me on FB (massimo.tosi_m <@t> libero.it) I think they could help you.
Thank you.
With my Best Regards,
Massimo Tosi

Yes, life is funny, considering that I first wanted to be a cytotech, but I
could not, so I ended up being an histotech and ended up liking histology
way more, and now I am working in a lab that focus more in cytopathology.
There is no microtomes, embedding machines, just a cryostat, and frozen
section stains and the cytology stains. I am not doing the smears yet,
another tech is doing it, but soon they will train me how to assist the
pathologist in a fine needle aspiration just in case the other tech can't do
it. I just stain the PAP slides, coverslip them, organize them etc, but
still it is good to know cytology so that when something wrong happens, I
can troubleshoot the problem.

The people from the lab assumes that histology and cytology are very alike
but they are not. One of them told me that you stains slides the same, and
that got me dumbfounded because in histology you don't use H20 saline as a
dehydrant solution. If I were a cytotech I would knew already that I had to
change the H20 saline frequently because is the solution that gets more
dirty after staining a few racks of slides.

In cytology hematoxylin is used, but orange,and EA, are not used in
histology. The bluing solution is almost the same, it used to be lithium
carbonate in the lab but seems they changed it to another chemical. They use
8 containers of alcohol 95%, and 3 of 99% when I compared that to the H&e
protocol of my histology textbook cytology uses a looooot more alcohol, so
the solutions are not the same. Plus you must be very careful with the
slides because they don't have more cytology samples, unlike histology if a
slide breaks you can look for that block of tissue and you cut a new slide,
that is not possible in cytology, well in their lab, because I ask this and
they told me that if I mess up a slide, then the pathologist has to obtain a
new sample from the patient, so I think cytology is a little more difficult
than histology for this reason.


Seems that these two careers are slowly getting incorporated. In my country
seems that this happen long time ago, but in the U.S I think cytology and
histology is going to become one profession. The new Frieda Carson
Histotechnology textbook has a new chapter about cytoprepatation. This book
appeared in amazon stores online like a month after I graduated histotech
school, so too bad it did not came before because I could have bough it
instead of the old version I have. I will ask a question about this book in
the forum later.

We'll thanks for the reply.