26 October 2021 (Tuesday) - A Discussion

A colleague asked if I had a spare few minutes today… I did, and together we sat and looked through a e-Haematimage case study.
I really did enjoy doing it.

Morphology EQA seems to follow the same format these days… someone at NEQAS HQ manages to track down the most obscure case, provide us with rather poorly made and poorly stained blood films, minimal clinical information and pretty much no laboratory data whatsoever. From this we are supposed to guess whether we’ve got a case of Bendii syndrome, xenopolycythaaemia or Andorian measles (forgive me if I appear a tad frustrated).


But today’s case was excellent. We were given full clinical information, full laboratory data, and clear pictures of individual blood cells and of fields of a blood film. Like we would be given in real life.
It turned out that the case was one of Burkitt’s lymphoma. I learned a lot about that specific condition (learned or remembered stuff I’d forgotten – not sure which!) but it was so good to sit with someone and discuss the case. Was that a blast cell? If yes, we said why it was. If no, we said why not. What is the difference between a myelocyte and a promyelocyte? Why is that ?

I spend so much time looking at blood films.. and pretty much all of that time is on my own. Back in the day we used to have morphology workshops. I wonder if we might have those again?

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