I've been battling with my stutter since I was born. In a few months I'll be a licensed physician. God help me...

I've been battling with my stutter since I was born. In a few months I'll be a licensed physician. God help me... Sometimes I regret going down this path. But I wanted more from life, so I went into med school. You might not realize it, and I certainly didn't when I started, but doctors are some of the most vocal people there are. Our words matter. Who'd have thought right? I used to think doctors just sat behind a desk, played with their stethoscopes and gave prescriptions. Well, yes, but we also attend to dozens of patients at a time, with new ones constantly arriving, and old ones constantly going. This 3 step process generally requires incredible amounts of communication. Extracting histories from patients, dealing with their family members incensed at my nosiness, endorsing their case to my attending physician and superior; my plan, my workup, my diagnosis, quoting textbooks and practice guidelines to justify what I'm doing so I don't get chewed out, and get chewed out anyway, all the while I'm coordinating with nurses, lab techs, lawyers, pharmaceuticals, and my colleagues who will need a rundown of all my patients on the floor for when they take over. And that's in addition to the weekly conferences, where we speak in front of a room full of doctors, whether it be presenting a case or a rundown of all the patients on our floor, and ideally in rapid fire in hope that by talking fast these sharp intellectuals won't notice our screw ups and pounce. And that's with 36 or more hours on the job without sleep. Needless to say, none of this is ideal for an anxious mouse with a lifelong stutter, like me. I honestly never thought I'd make it this far. I always thought I would fail, or drop out, but somehow I just kept going. I honestly love medicine. I love dealing with patients, figuring out how they're broken, then formulating a plan to fix them, and implementing those plans systematically. Intellectually I'm made for this, but sadly sometimes my mouth can't verbalize what it's in my brain. It hasn't been QUITE an issue so far, most of my presentations have been in groups in front of my classmates or professors, at worst in front of residents, and speaking as a med student doesn't have quite the same heft yet. When I endorse a patient, it's normally to a low level physician, who are more understanding that I can't get my words out. It's not like I have any bearing on actual patient management, I'm just a student. I'm worst on the phone, which is unfortunate since a cell phone is like a 3rd appendage to a doctor. There's always someone you need to call. Always So what happens in a few months when I'm licensed? When I start my residency? When I actually begin to have an impact on my patient's life? How can I admit a patient if I can't endorse them to my attending without stuttering? What if they're currently in arrest, seizing, hemorrhaging, and I need to administer 0.5mg IV atropine stat but can't because I'm suddenly unable to communicate? Conventional advice for stutterers is "people don't really care if you stutter", but that won't work for me. My attendings and colleagues would, and should, get frustrated if I'm stammering through a patient's history, if I'm substituting difficult words for easier ones and changing the meaning, If I'm wasting their time, because lives could literally be on the line. Sorry you had to read that essay, but this is terrifying for me. It's honestly gotten better over the years, with the amount of practice my mouth has had in presentations and stressful speaking situations, it had to, but just not enough. I've been able to get this far, but I doubt I can go much further unless I fix my stutter. I could literally and easily kill someone with poor communication. It's happened before, and those people DIDNT stutter. I don't know anyone in the field who stutters. I've never even seen a speech pathologist, or anyone versed in dysfluency. We had a short module during our pediatrics rotation, but that was it. There's not really much focus in med school, so I'm just as clueless as most laymen, unless we talk about the difference between Brocka's and Wernick's aphasia and the Brodmann's areas involved, but that's not helpful. So, yeah, I'm stuck. Anyone else have their life put on hold because of a stutter?