Newly diagnosed; dumb question about biopsy report

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purpletron
purpletron Member Posts: 9
edited June 2014 in Just Diagnosed

I have just been diagnosed with triple-negative grade 3 IDC... Very sorry to be here, but very glad you are all around! These forums have been an amazing source of information and support already.

I have a probably-stupid question about my pathology results, specifically the number of core samples, for which I see conflicting numbers in the report:

In the 'Gross Description' section, it says "the specimen consists of six tan cores of tissue with the largest core measuring 13mm in length and the smallest core measuring 2mm in length. In toto in cassettes: A1, A2 - three cores each".

And in the 'Final Diagnosis', it starts with "Breast, left, core biopsies at 5:00 o'clock (4 cores)" but later "Five of six core fragments are positive".

Can anyone here tell me if this is just unclear terminology (i.e. some cores are split, so there were four cores but six core fragments), or at least, if they saw similarly mismatched numbers in their reports? To my memory, they took just four separate samples, and the discrepancy has been bugging me. I'll admit, I did get a foolish and selfish flash of "maybe this is someone else's cancer!" but now I just want to be able to cross this stupid concern off the playlist of worries shuffling through my head, and sadly I won't talk to my medical team again until after the holidays...

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