Night Terror

Last Wednesday night, Will had what we assume, in retrospect, to be a night terror.

The night started out innocently enough. Will went to bed at his usual 8-8:30 bedtime without a fuss and settled into sleep pretty quickly. Around 11:30, he started crying. Loudly. Rolf went in to soothe him, and I hopped to the kitchen to get him some water. His cries just got louder and more frantic. When I reached the room, Will was sitting up in bed, shaking his head from side to side and batting at Rolf's hand. I tried to give him the sippy cup, and he knocked it from my hand. When Will gets up at night needing water, he will often knock the sippy away until he realizes what it is, so I didn't think much of it. We tried to pick him up and cuddle him, but he just thrashed around in our arms, screaming. We assumed he was having a nightmare, so Rolf brought him to our room where the light was on.

Will continued his thrashing and crying, which had by now become full-fledged screaming. His eyes were open, but he wasn't seeing us. He beat at us, kicked at us, wrenched away from our grasps, and writhed around. Rolf eventually calmed him down by talking low to him ("shush"ing wasn't working at all), and Will stopped his freakout. Unfortunately, he wanted nothing to do with sleep. He fought us tooth and nail until 1:00 AM, when I finally took him back to his room, held him, rocked him, and sang him back to sleep. At 1:30. He was wary of his room the whole time, looking around suspiciously, pointing at things and whimpering. I had his low-wattage star lamp on for him, and that seemed to help. When I turned off the lamp, he started crying again. I had to hang over his crib and rub his back and sing to him before he settled down enough. As much as it hurt me to do it after such a horrific episode, I had to leave him before he was fully asleep and let him cry. I knew he was good and tired (and knew for damn sure I was), and my presence just kept him on the defensive and awake. Within five minutes, he was asleep. He was up by 6:15, acting as if he had slept the night through without incident.

The only thing that makes us wonder if this episode was something other than a night terror is that Will's foot seemed extremely sensitive. He kicked his leg like he was in pain, and if we touched his leg, his screams turned into his "I'm hurting" cry. Everything else pointed to night terror - 1st 3rd of the sleep cycle, awake but not aware, resistant to soothing, and not seeming to remember a thing about the episode in the morning.

My other thought was that he had either a) growing pains or b) achy joints left from his feverish start to the week combined with the night terror.

Fortunately, it hasn't happened again, although if it does, we now know to leave him alone, watch to make sure he doesn't hurt himself, and let the terror run its course. That will be so hard to do, watching my baby panic without being able to help, but I know that any ministrations on our part will not do anything but prolong his panic.

Ugh.