First of all, MAJOR CONGRATS on making it through med school so far! You're achieving my dream, I hope to be where you are in a few years, but right now I'm just a lowly healthcare assistant. It's so competitive though and you must be something really special to have made it to where you're at right now. I'm actually really curious. Are there really that many situations where a pause of a few seconds whilst you get a word out is the difference between life and death? Even if they're in cardiac arrest, does a delay of a few moments matter to the point where it's likely to tip that balance? And do you think it's likely that you would stutter in that moment? It would be a very high-adrenaline moment, after all. As for stuttering through a patient's history, I guess I just don't agree with you that people should get frustrated. You're not "wasting their time", you're giving your best effort and doing a professional job and you deserve to be treated with respect. Is it really a significant amount of time anyway? How many seconds of their day does it really take? Everyone is different, and I don't think it's okay for people to react angrily when they encounter small differences like this one. Thinking about my own job, I don't speak to doctors but I do interact with nurses a lot and we are all very busy. Lots of the nurses don't speak English as a first language so, due to their accent or whatever, communicating can take a few extra moments sometimes. If you were in my position, would you be rude or impatient towards colleagues like that? Does that seem okay to you? Because it doesn't seem okay to me. Frankly, we are very understaffed and I am really grateful to have those nurses as colleagues, because we really need them. Minor communication difficulties pale into insignificance compared to the simple fact that they are there, competent, work hard and do a professional job. We really need more doctors as well, so I feel the same way about them too. If I saw someone giving any of my colleagues a hard time over their way of speaking, I'd like to think I'd speak up, you know? Because that's not acceptable.