I have my white lab coat on today. It's long- down past my knees- and has long sleeves that I roll up to keep them out of my way. Hospital logo on the right side, my name and my specialty over the left breast pocket.

These days, it's uncommon for me to be wearing my lab coat- it's pretty laid-back here in the department. I've never ever seen the other pathologists in one. I usually wear mine only when I'm cold.

But I love my white coat. It feels like home when I wear it.

I remember the first time I put on a white coat-- early into my 1st year of medical school. I walked across the breezeway at Jackson, and noticed that people acted differently to me when I wore it. I felt set-apart, somehow. It was a strange feeling.

I went through a second-year rebellion against my white coat. It seemed much more sexy to see patients in my street clothes, with a stethoscope draped around my neck. Besides feeling like a big shot, I could see the point in that attire-- less stressful for the patients. No "white coat hypertension."

However, the white coat became an essential tool in the latter years of medical school- the 3rd and 4th year clinical rotations. It was a long white briefcase/filing cabinet. A friend weighed himself one day on the wards and discovered that he was 10 pounds lighter without his coat on.

At any given time, a medical student or resident's lab coat would contain the following:

- The requisite stethoscope, draped around the neck or coiled up in a deep pocket.
- A flashlight. Hopefully. This was often essential, but most of us either had lost it or it ran out of batteries.
-A wide variety of pens-mostly from drug reps- the Viagra pen was the most sought after...-Sharpies, highlighters, pencils, rulers
-Various and sundry plastic calculators- also from drug reps- to calculate everything from due dates to visual acuity.
-Test tubes, extra syringes, needles, IV lines, gauze, suture kits, band-aids
-Paper, paper and more paper--lab results, lists of patients and their vital signs, notes scribbled on napkins, spare order forms, lecture notes, to-do lists. Paper bulging out of every available orifice in the lab coat.
-Hand sanitizer
-Pocket versions of the most essential medical texts, for reference: The Washington Manual, Merck, Pocket Cecil's, Pocket Robbins (for us pathologists).
-Money (hopefully), IDs, cafeteria vouchers, pictures of the kids that we saw infrequently during those years.
-Pagers. We might have two or three at any given time. Numeric pagers, voice pagers, walkie-talkies.

Obviously, the more pockets your white coat had, the better off you were.

In some medical school traditions, the length of your lab coat corresponded to your status. A short white coat as a medical student and intern, and the full-length coat reserved for the upper level residents and attendings.

I am wearing the full-length version, and have been for 10 years now. Hard to believe it's been 10 years since someone called 'Doctor!'--- and I realized they were talking to me.