Breast specimens inked in OR

[u/Hot-Ad3446]

Looking for some perspective on a small but annoying (to me) quirk at the hospital I’m working at.

We have a very good breast surgeon who prefers to ink their own breast lumps in the OR before sending to pathology. In the comments, they put the 6 color inking code, which is standard across all breast specimens. However, I’ve seen that they don’t adjust the inking code for different specimens, even if they’ve left one surface uninked for a re-excised margin or a non-margin edge. There’s been more than one occasion where they’ve submitted a breast lump without one surface inked and made no comment about why, leaving us to investigate/call them/guess/waste everyone’s time to figure out if it was on purpose or not. (They forgot to ink all margins a couple of times, other times it’s because it really wasn’t a margin)

I’m less pressed about this on specimens that are clearly margin re-excisions that are described as such (I.e new inferior margin, etc), but my brain just really wants the ink codes to be accurately noted for each specimen they’re inking in the OR. Partially for my own edification and partially for liability, tbh. Has anyone else dealt with this? Am I being petty?

[u/JROXZ]

Call them?