Things that We Do Not Know

Over thousands of years, human beings have been learning more and more about this world, and have figured out many ways to avoid risks and make our lives easier. Even in ancient times, we used fire to scare away animals, built simple boats to cross rivers and lakes, and armed ourselves by sharpening stones and sticks. In nowadays, with advanced technology and instrument, people know the world better than ever. We use high-quality astronomical telescopes to study outer space, looking for the possible resources and neighbors in the quiet universe; we use high speed computers to calculate and create machines which are cheap and easy to use; and we also explore ourselves and develop a series of lab tests to monitor health status and control diseases. It's surprising how much people already know about this world, and how much we've changed our lives by using the knowledge we have. For people like me who are used to "modern lives", it's almost impossible to survive in the wild any more (actually a shut down of wifi can cause great panic among us).

But if you assume we know everything, that's also wrong. Knowing a lot doesn't rule out the possibility of ignoring the 1% which can make things very different. This is what I learned from my pregnancy which ended in the 6th month due to a placental abruption. I started to see my OB/GYN every month since the first trimester, taking prenatal vitamins regularly, doing all the lab tests to make sure we were expecting a healthy baby. All the results looked promising, and we thought we would have a healthy baby girl in January next year. Even in the week before placental abruption, when I was in the hospital because of a sudden bleeding and contraction, doctors ruled out "all the bad possibilities" after reading my blood tests and ultrasound tests. Unfortunately it still happened. Two days after I woke up from the emergency surgery, when I had my tubes in the lungs removed, I asked my doctor :"So what caused this?" She said, "I don't know, we probably will never know."

I guess sometimes we have to accept the limitation on our understanding of the world. Despite how much we've already known about the world, there are things that remain mysterious. Like my pregnancy, which was considered as normal and non-risky by modern medicine, turned out to be an outlier. As a mother who still want to have kids in the future, I do want to know the reason so that I may carefully avoid situations that could trigger it again. However, I got no answer. And the only thing I can do, quoted from the doctor, is to "more closely monitor your pregnancy, and order more lab tests". Seriously? I was having lab tests the day before abruption, and you were still not able to predict it.

After discharged from the hospital, I sometimes do feel frustrated for living in this day and age because of what happened, and I feel very powerless in addressing situations like this. But meanwhile, I also feel lucky for living in this era - if I'd lived decades ago, I could have lost my life. I still hope that in my lifetime the reason of my abruption can be found out. But I already accept the fact that there are simply things that we do not know. No matter how well you plan and monitor your life, there are uncertainties that can not be detected and thus can not be avoided. We are only human beings.