Why does each woman have different amount of lymph nodes?
That has two explanations. One is that it may be the degree of surgery being done, how much tissue was removed, and it also may be how larger the lymph nodes are so that the pathologist can find them. If the pathologist spends a lot of time getting out all the lymph nodes from the tissue or they are fairly large because they are inflamed even if not involved with cancer sometimes there is an inflammatory reaction that makes them bigger, it would be easier to pick them out. If they are not involved at all then they may be very small and the pathologist has to spend a lot of time and he or she may or may not do that. That is the difference in which the surgeon provides an adequate specimen, and the compulsiveness by which the pathologist tries to find all those lymph nodes.
