The Hefty Price Of Ignorance

Today at the hospital, a certain man was demanding a DNA test for his “kids.” He kept saying he didn’t have enough, but he didn’t care about the cost of the test. And according to what I was told, he has 4 kids, so the total was going to be quite pricey for him.

Everything stemmed from a simple blood donation mismatch. He lost a lot of blood after getting into an accident, so the doctors told his wife they needed to perform a blood transfusion as soon as possible to avoid complications or, in the worst-case scenario, the demise of her husband.

The woman couldn’t donate because she herself had low hemoglobin, so they asked her to bring her first child, who is 21 years old and fortunately has enough blood. After checking his blood group, he didn’t match with that of his father, nor did he match with that of his mother. So let me make it simple. Both husband and wife are A+, but the child is O+.

I don’t know how they eventually found a donor for him, but they did. So after he recovered, he found out his child had a different blood group from that of his and his wife’s. And that was when all hell broke loose. He started accusing his wife of being a cheat, but all the woman did was to cry.

The health personnel tried their best to calm him down, but he just kept shouting and calling his wife all sorts of names. By that time, he didn’t even want to know the blood groups of his other kids. The security had to escort him out of the premises because he was making a scene.

In that moment, I felt very sad because if the man was very well educated and ready to learn, he would know that A+ parents can actually give birth to an O+ child. And that simply happens by the child taking the recessive O from both parents and expressing it as his blood group. It might sound so complicated to an uneducated person, but it’s very possible.

Fast forward to the DNA results, yeah? All four kids are actually his, and from what I heard, the wife told him she didn’t want anything to do with him again. And she also doesn’t want him near her kids ever again. I’ve heard stories of ignorance doing so many things, but I didn’t know it could go this extreme of causing separation in a marriage that was once so beautiful. And when you think about it, the kids would also be affected.

It’s not cool to be ignorant, but then you know what’s even worse? Not being ready to learn and understand certain things. If the man had calmed down to listen to the health personnel, all these wouldn't have happened.