My World Of Stuttering

Greetings! Stuttering (as it is called in the USA) or Stammering (as it is called in Great Britain) can be a very emotionally painful disorder. First, there are different kinds of stuttering but the one being described here is developmental stuttering that usually begins around the age of 2 to 5. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSMVI--which is essentially the "bible," for psychological disorder/illness) described stuttering as disturbance in the normal fluency and time patterning of speech (inappropriate for the individual's age) characterized by frequent occurrences of one or more of the following:
*sound and syllable repititions
*sound prolongations
*interjections
*broken words (pausing within a word)
*audible or silent blocking (filled or unfilled pausing in speech)
*circumlocutions (word substitutions to avoid problematic words)
*words produced with an excess of physical tention
*monosyllabic whole-word repetitions
*the disturbance in fluency interferes with academic or occupational achievement or with social
communication
*If a speech-motor or sensory deficit is present, the speech difficulties are in excess of those
usually associated with these problems.

Stuttering affects roughly 1% of the populations (about 3 million in the USA) and 4x as much boys than girls are affected. It has been said that about 80% of stutterers recover by the age of 16 and those who don't (the remaining 20%) goes on to become adult stuterers, like myself.

My journey of stuttering began when I was about 3 years old in Jamaica. As I grew up and attend elementary school in Jamaica (May Pen Primary, Clarendon) I became more so aware of my stuttering because kids made fun of stutterers in general! I am going to spare you the long stories of embarrassment throughout my life as a result of stuttering but there were many. I thought my dream of becoming a physician would never be realized. My parents sent me to the USA at age 14 to realized this dream and after much struggled through Newtown High School (New York), Rollins College (Winter Park, Florida), Oral Roberts University (Tulsa, Oklahoma), Oklahoma State School of Osteopathic Medicine (Tulsa, Oklahoma), Completed first year of Internal Medicine (Oklahoma University Health Science Center), became a license physician in Oklahoma and will be license in the State of New York I prevailed.

I have won many battles against stuttering but the war is not over yet. I am currently a member of the National Stuttering Association, am writing a book on my own personal journey with stuttering, and would like to finish up my Neurology Residency that I started and took a break from 8/2009. I want to encouraged all stutterers that they can become anything they want to me. The road is not going to be easy but that is indeed life in a nutshell! For me it was my faith in God that sustained me the most during some of the most difficult times--and there were many. This is just an introduction to you all--my first blog on here! I hope to communicate with you all more in the days and weeks ahead.