…salted lithium.

My girlfriend flipped out tonight, she was completely out of control, she threw our baby’s highchair across the kitchen, she was swearing and yelling at her six-year old son, but mostly at me, and accusing me of keeping our two-year old away from her.

I had just arrived at her home, to pick up Victor so he could stay at my place because my girlfriend has been sick and also because Monday and Wednesday nights Victor normally stays with me to give her a break.

As my girlfriend and I were getting Victor dressed, he screamed. He had seen his older brother touching one of his books, and Victor gets very possessive sometimes. So he screamed for less than a second. My girlfriend told Victor’s brother to back away from the book. I told her everything was fine, lets just get Victor dressed.

Victor screamed again, my girlfriend reacted by getting angry at her older son. Without looking back she told him, sternly, to get away from the book. I looked over, and he had already backed away. I told her again everything was fine, that Victor was just acting out, and that I could put Victor’s mittens on by myself.

Then she flipped out.

She immediately insisted her oldest go straight to his room, and straight to bed. Again, I tried to tell her everything was fine, that her oldest hadn’t done anything. And that’s when the swearing and yelling started. In less than ten seconds she must have said “fuck” twenty times. She was mostly yelling at me, but not about me. It was about how I didn’t understand what she was going through, about how people criticized her over how she was raising her oldest son.

About how people were blaming her over his behavioural problems. I tried to tell her her oldest had done nothing wrong, and that she was using profanity, and screaming right in front of him, and then it became about me. But about things I’ve never done. Like try to keep her away from our son.

I told her I was going to leave with Victor, and maybe he should stay with me for Tuesday (which had been an option before the freak out), and she escalated to the point where she was daring me to take both boys home with me.

After her oldest had run into his room, she locked herself in the bathroom for a few moments. Then she came roaring out, brushed by the highchair, turned, picked it up and tossed it across the kitchen where it slammed into the wall.

Which freaked me out, so I threw a mostly empty plastic Pepsi bottle I had in my hand across the hall and started yelling back. I was trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. Why was she verbally attacking me? Why was she verbally attacking her son? Who was telling her I wanted to keep her away from Victor? What the fuck was going on?

Her answer: when I had told her “everything is fine”, after she told her oldest to leave the book alone, I was questioning her authority as a parent, and criticizing her parenting skills.

She told me I had been avoiding her, not being close enough to her. But she, her oldest and Victor, had been with me overnight just this past Friday night, Saturday morning, overnight Saturday night and Sunday morning. Victor was with her and his brother all day Sunday, while I worked in my apartment, then Victor was with me Sunday night, Monday during the day, then with her for two hours Monday night, and now he’s here with me tonight.

When I tried to tell her I had no intention of ever keeping her away from Victor, she told me no one understands what she’s going through.

I had to leave. I tried to leave, but she kept accusing me of things. Mostly the same things. I kept trying to defend myself, and finally I just took Victor and walked away.

I’m still shaken up by what went on. I don’t react well when people suddenly start yelling at me. I was yelling back, but not making any threats or throwing insults (I do regret throwing the bottle, but in my defence it was not at her, or near her), again, I was just trying to figure out what was going on.

It’s irrational, outrageous, but not completely unexpected. In total the episode lasted a very long five minutes.

My girlfriend is three months into our second high risk pregnancy, and she’s had a couple of scares over the past ten days — some bleeding, an ER visit and some watery discharge.

And I have been a little distant over the past two weeks, because I’ve been dealing with my own health scare which may or may not be real.

I think some of it had to do with my being only able to stay long enough to pick up Victor and go. I think she had expected me to stay with her for the evening. But I couldn’t. I had eaten dinner with my mother, and forgot to take my new insulin prescription with me. So I felt like I had to rush home to take it.

As of last week I’m now on a second type of insulin. In addition to the slow release “Lantus” I’ve been taking at night, for the past few months, I’ve recently been prescribed “Humalog”, which I must take three times a day, ten minutes before I eat.

I’m taking the Humalog because a blood test I took in after my Lithium / insulin overdose last September showed my kidney functions are down to 37% of where they’re supposed to be. I just got the results two weeks ago. Which has freaked me out. But, according to my diabetes nurse, this was expected.

Nobody told me this, but a blood test last year showed my kidneys had slowed over several years to 42% efficiency. Allowing type-2 diabetes to go untreated for fifteen years will do that.

So the drop wasn’t unexpected, it was even in my file that if there was a drop I was to be taken off the Glyburide and put on the second insulin right away. But no one told me that either. So, until I could see my diabetes nurse, I panicked. I also became a little more self-absorbed than usual, a little more distant from my girlfriend than usual. Maybe a little more impatient.

But again, in my defence, I spent two weeks looking at my son and thinking “not only am I not going to see you graduate, I’m not going to see you potty trained”.

But apparently the second insulin, along with some blood pressure pills, will keep me going for a while longer. My blood sugar numbers have been entirely normal since I started taking the second needles — which is leaving me tired and a little irritable, so there’s that as well.

The pregnancy was mostly expected. It’s something my girlfriend and I had been discussing almost since we found out she was pregnant with Victor. We both wanted another, she wanted to try again sooner than I did. I would have preferred to wait another few years, to let her body heal and to find out how I could be as a father.

But she made the point of wanting to have her third child while she was still young. She’s thirty-four now. When ‘New One’ is ready for school my girlfriend will be thirty-eight (ish), and still young enough for school and / or a career.

So the due date is the first week of August.

And it is another “high risk pregnancy”, with all the unexpected hospital visits and surgical procedures and pain that goes along with it.

I am not exaggerating when I say her pregnancy with Victor pushed me, and her, very close to our physical and mental limits.

I made sure, during the summer, to repeat that over and over again. To make sure this was what she wanted, that she had to remember what had happened, to understand what was going to happen, and to be willing to go through it all again.

To be honest, when she did tell me in November that she was pregnant, I thought we were still kind of in the planning stage. She told me back in September-ish she had stopped using protection, but I was just coming down from a six week Lithium overdose where it made sense to me to stab myself 30+ times with a needle and give myself a third degree burn on my arm.

I wasn’t in a healthy state of mind.

I have, however, already come up with the coolest middle name ever.

Now I have to figure out where we stand after tonight.

…I called my girlfriend as I was finishing this, and we talked for a few minutes. The call ended with us telling the other that we love them. So that’s good.

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