I had surgery last month to reattach my supraspinatus tendon, which was torn during a fall, to whatever it’s supposed to be attached to. The procedure included shaving off some of my acromion to make more room in there (or something like that). The reattachment was done by drilling holes in the bone and “sewing” the tendon to it.
I was looking at my insurance web site this morning and a pathologist is billing them $260. Why would the services of a pathologist have been needed for this?
Oops. Wrong forum. Could a mod please move to GQ? Thanks.
Pathologists look at all tissues removed during a surgery, purely as a precaution. It’s amazing how often significant abnormalities are discovered in supposedly “normal” tissue specimens.
Thank you. It seems strange to me for this to be done when the injury was obviously caused by an accident.
Do you know what, in this type of surgery, there would have been to test? Bone fragments? Muscle tissue from where they cut through it to get to the tendon/bone? Tissue from the tendon itself? Fluids from that spot where the MRI showed there was fluid that shouldn’t have been there? Would the surgeon have taken samples of these things specifically for pathology or only if there were pieces that were being removed as part of the procedure?
Also, what findings might have been made other than “normal?” This is my my first surgery as an adult so I’m pretty clueless about these things. I assume the findings were normal since nobody’s notified me of anything.
What the surgeon sent was probably just little bits of tendon and ligament together with fragments of skeletal muscle and bone chips. I very much doubt it was examined microscopically; generally with such cases, the pathologist can just eyeball the stuff and see that it’s normal. The surgeon just removed the tissue as a routine part of the surgery; it wasn’t a specific biopsy.
As to what COULD have been found: tumors, mostly.
Sometimes tumors announce their presence by a pathologic fracture, or by severe tissue damage as a result of relatively minor trauma. In your case I’m sure nothing’s seriously wrong, but when hospitals design their procedures, they err on the side of not overlooking anything, just to be safe.
Thanks very much for the information. I wasn’t too worried about them finding something, I just wanted to understand what they would have looked at and what they might have found. I appreciate that the hospital, etc. want to err on the side of safety but, in this case, it seems like a waste of money. I wouldn’t be saying that if they’d have found something though. Thanks again!