Ah, the slide folder.

A lonely existence. Laying quietly on a lab shelf, waiting to be used.

Unless you’re in a clinical pathology department.

At least once a week a mass departmental email will land in my inbox requesting that any unused slide folders be returned to the clinical labs — they are running critically low. Again.

Sometimes they serve as reminders to the pathologists to return the slides (in their respective slide folders) to the clinical labs when they are done with reporting clinical findings. But I’ll tell you, after working for a pathologist a few years ago, the slides (in their slide folders) will pile up on shelves in their offices. The work complete, the histology slides just needing to find their way back to the lab that stores them.

So where did I find this stack of empty slide folders?

I found them in our neuropathology office  just down the hall from me. While they don’t process and stain specimen slides on my floor any more, they do still store them here.

You can see in the photo below just a small sample of the slides stored in these archives. In the photo, you can only see maybe a hundred patient cases (sitting in those four slide drawers on the left in the photo), but this room has thousands of them filed numerically in specially-designed slide filing cabinets. I can only imagine what the main department’s slide room looks like.
(I wonder if that’s where the slides from one of my biopsies is stored)