"Special stain"

My personal experience is that if they find any atypical cells they send it for e-cadherin staining/analysis, which determines if the cells are ductal or lobular. I had atypical lobular hyperplasia on my needle biopsy and they did e-cadherin staining. An absence of e-cadherin present (in general) confirms that the cells are lobular.

I'm sure there are other tests that are done in different circumstances.

I'm not a pathologist or a physician, but I am a pharmacist. I don't know if the stain situation is the same as pharmaceuticals, but all sorts of things cycle in and out of being on backorder: the last few months it was sodium bicarbonate injectable (sterile, more purified baking soda), and now its several types/packaging of injectable morphine. At least with medications, the FDA has said the pharmaceutical companies don't have to reveal why the shortage is occurring. Often times, there's only one company that supplies the medication. Even if, for an extreme example which HAS happened in the past, (this was with injectable amiodarone), they decide its not profitable, they can stop making the medication. It doesn't matter if there is no therapeutic alternative. Sometimes they later bring the medication back on the market but increase the price by 10 fold or more.

Some people on this website have had to wait several months for their results: one time they sent her slides to another hospital for a second opinion and didn't tell the patient.

Normally they can pretty easily tell whether or not a sample has invasive cancer vs non-invasive (normal or higher risk or LCIS or DCIS). But sometimes it really takes some expertise, which is why some people get 2nd opinions on their pathology report. For example, this slide presentation says that about 15% of lobular carcinomas have some e-cadherin staining (pg. 6) http://www.ucsfcme.com/2012/slides/MAP1201A/18YiCh...

You do NOT want the pathologist to make a mistake. For almost all breast cancers, you don't get diagnosed without a pathologist looking at a piece of tissue. (The exception is for the rare inflammatory breast cancer, which is sometimes diagnosed clinically.)

Its awfully hard to wait, but you don't want to be among the people who are told they don't have breast cancer, then find out they do (false negative). False negatives are always sad and bad, and sometimes they are unavoidable: breast cancer diagnosis is not perfect. But you want to have the best chance at getting an accurate diagnosis.

Best wishes, leaf

Of course its miserable waiting! We all want to know what is going on so we can plan for what is ahead. That's a totally normal reaction, but its just awful to go through. Our minds just naturally go to the 'worst case scenario', especially if we have a history of trauma.

But most women do not get the 'worst case scenario'. I know its awful telling the 'what ifs' part of your brain that. Our brains do not always act logically.

You are NOT alone.