I am an HTL but I have to stain pap smears. In the Papanicalou procedure for fine needle aspirations I have to stain the slides in sodium chloride first for 25 seconds in total (15 seconds in one container and 10 in another container). This for me is the trickiest part when staining cytology because if slides are not well dehydrated in saline then the cells are not going to absorb the stains well, and the result will be a pinkish slide, when it is suppose to look blue-greenish.
I had this problem today where I stained an entire rack of slides, and all the slides turned blue (which means they stained correctly) except 4 slides which turned out pinkish (which is a sign that they did not dehydrated properly in sodium chloride (h20 saline). Is there a solution to this issue. Can these slides be re-stained? I know this newsgroup is for histology only but I would like to know if histotech and cytotechs have encountered this issue in their labs and how they ended up solving the problem. Thanks in advance _______________________________________________ Histonet mailing list Histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu http://lists.utsouthwestern.edu/mailman/listinfo/histonet