Kuhn, Judy - thanks for your replies, much appreciated. I can see tho,
that I didn't explain myself very well, since you're both telling me
basically that I don't want to be doing what I DO want to be doing :)
So let me try to go back and say more clearly why we want to do this,
and we'll see if maybe I really am trying to beat a dead horse into
getting up and walking...

We are a cancer cytogenetics lab specifically, not a general path or
hem lab, and unfortunately don't have one close by to ask for advice.
Basically what we do is receive blood and bone marrow specimens from
physician's offices in order to perform G-band karyotype analysis and
FISH for cancer-specific (mostly leukemia and MDS) abnormalities. We
culture the specimens short-term in special medium to encourage the
cells to divide so that we can examine the chromosomes at the
microscope after harvest. This is tissue-culture, not microbiological
culture (at least we try really hard not to get any microbial
growth!). The cells grow best in culture if they're set up at a
moderate density, yet our patient specimens as recieved vary several
orders of magnitude in their nucleated cell density, from new-
diagnosis CLLs or acute leuks to post-treatment or rule-out-MDS
pancytopenias.

Surely all these bloods and marrows are having cell counts done on
them as well, but not here, and the results are not available to us
unless we chase them down, one dr's office at a time. Plus, we often
need to set up cultures right away, and can't delay wating for someone
else's results to be communicated to us.

So right now we dilute out a bit of sample in acetic acid to lyse,
then count manually on a hemacytometer. This is fine for a few
specimens a day, but our volume is going up quickly, and we're
spending ridiculous amounts of time daily counting these things.
Especially since the countable range is so narrow that most specimens
we need to either re-dilute, or concentrate, in order to be able to
count a decent number.

We want something like a CBC5 to do simple semi-automated WBCs, with
some reasonable dilution range, and +/-20% accuracy (remember we're
just trying to adjust our culture inoculation volume to within a rough
range, we're not reporting these numbers at all!). There may indeed be
other small more-recent machines that we could turn to, but for now, I
just want to find out if this one that we have is going to be usable
for us (or not).

So now on to your specific comments:
Diluents and calibrators are available, not from B-C but from second-
market sources; Judy, thanks for an additional source that I hadn't
found yet.

No doubt an experienced MT could figure out some reasonable
approximation of a manual, but again, no MTs here, all cytogenetic
tech specialists and not generalists, alas.

I'm not going to worry about a few percent of nucleated reds, since no
doubt we're counting them already with the hemacytometer :) and flow
capability would be a lot more information than we need! Most of these
spec are split for flow before they send part on to us anyway; in an
ideal world, they would send us their cell counts before we needed to
set up our cultures, but in practice it ain't gonna happen.

We do dilute the marrows and let the chunks settle out before putting
them in for counts; we almost never see spicules in the hemacytometer
chambers. I hope clogging won't be a problem with the counter, but
that's one of the things I'd hoped a manual would settle.

And yes, these are human specimens. I did grow up a blood from my
horse for chromosomes once, and have done a few mouse and rat samples
thru the years... but these are just ordinary 2-legged animals :)

So... to get back to the point... the orginal actual question...

Does anyone out there have a CBC5 *with* a manual, who might be
willing to copy or fax it to us?

Thanks
Anita