'I don't regret choosing pathology'

I am a pathologist at the Cumberland Infirmary, Carlisle. I diagnose the diseases in bits of tissue removed from people.

For instance, if somebody has a breast removed I would examine it and say whether there is cancer (although hopefully we would know this before we removed the breast), what type it is, and how the disease has progressed.

We are more involved in the screening services and we do get the satisfaction of seeing the number of women dying from cervical cancer going down Dr Fergus Young

I will also assess how many lymph nodes are affected, whether the cancer is completely excised and whether there are any further tests that are needed.

Basically, when anything is removed by a surgeon from the body it comes to us.

We also get skin biopsies from the GP and cervical smears. If they are abnormal or possibly abnormal they come to us.

We would also get needle biopsies from the breast. We would look at them in the clinic and you can usually tell whether it is cancer or not, so the patient can get counselling immediately.

We also do post mortems and look at sputum and urine specimens.

The most common work we do is looking at cervical smears, although we also do a lot of skin biopsies and endoscopies.

We perform post-mortems and we do about 8-900 of these a year.

We get about 18,000 specimens sent to us from surgeons and GPs, so between five of us we do about 60 of these a day.

Understaffing is a big problem. We have a big workload and because we are working by looking at things under the microscope all the time it can be mentally, but not physically tiring.

I think just being able to provide a service is the most satisfying thing.

Pathologists are not really looking at the good things, but are looking for possible diseases.

I think the most satisfying thing is feeling that what we do is worthwhile.

There is much more team work and I think that makes the job much easier to say 'yes I think we should look at that again'.

Pathologists do a lot of microscope wok

Obviously it is easier to say if it is cancer, but if we decide it is not, we can tend to think is that because we have not looked hard enough.

We do get a history from the surgeon and if they think it is cancer we will look again and consider whether the biopsy has missed picking up a lesion.

We are more involved in the screening services and we do get the satisfaction of seeing the number of women dying from cervical cancer going down.

It is satisfying to think that we are part of that national team.

I do sometimes wonder whether it was because I would not have to do nights.

But I did take a year out from my degree to do pathology and that was because the professors at Dundee, where I studied, were so motivational.

They made pathology interesting. At least four of my year dabbled in pathology and two of us from 100 became pathologists - that is higher than the average.

I like my job and I don't regret choosing it.

Maybe if I had been a plastic surgeon it might have been more exciting, but I don't think I would change.

I think we will have more multidisciplinary working.

I suspect from the government planning there will be more and more networking, which seems to involve the fact that you can send something to someone else for an opinion, which we do already if we are unsure about something.

CV - Dr Fergus Young

1985: Graduated from Dundee University

1992: Got MRC Path 1992

1994: Made Consultant Histopathologist at Cumberland Infirmary, Carlisle