Welcome To The Formalin Fixation — let me tell you my "why"
If you've ever Googled a pathology question and landed on a 47-slide PowerPoint from 2009 or a textbook excerpt that costs $89 to unlock, you already know the problem.
Good pathology education is out there — but it's scattered, dense, and often written for one very specific audience. The med student cramming for boards. The researcher who already knows the basics. The physician who just wants the answer.
Nobody seems to be talking directly to the people who actually live in the lab.
I'm a Pathologist Assistant, which means I spend my days at the grossing bench, in the frozen section room, and everywhere in between. I make sense of the space between clinical medicine and diagnostic pathology. It's a role most people outside the lab have never heard of, which honestly says a lot about how little attention this field gets.
Over the years I've trained newer colleagues, answered the same questions hundreds of times, and watched smart people struggle to find reliable, practical resources on topics that should be easy to look up. Things like: why does fixation time actually matter? What's happening to that specimen between the OR and the microscope? How do I read what this report is actually telling me?
So I built this space.
This site is for everyone who works in or around pathology — students figuring out if this is the career for them, new techs and PAs building their foundations, experienced folks who want a resource they can actually trust, and clinicians who want to understand what's happening on the other side of the specimen container.
Here's what you'll find here:
A weekly blog covering lab topics, techniques, and the kind of practical knowledge that doesn't always make it into textbooks. Some posts will be foundational. Some will get into the weeds. All of them will be written like a human being, not a journal article.
A weekly newsletter that recaps what's new, highlights interesting cases or topics from the field, and eventually becomes a place where this community shares ideas.
Eventually, we will add a video library — because some things just make more sense when you can see them.
And down the road, a podcast. Because some conversations are better out loud.
I'll be building this out over time, starting with the techniques and concepts I get asked about most.
If you've made it this far, I'm glad you're here. Subscribe to get the blog and newsletter, and stay tuned — there's a lot more coming.
And if there's a topic you've always wanted a straight, honest explanation of, hit reply and tell me. This thing is going to be shaped by the people who actually use it.
See you next week!
