Hi Amanda.
You poor thing. I hope you get some rest soon. I know exactly how you feel.
Hailey went through the same thing at 10mths. She was always a brilliant sleeper and slept through the night from about 10 weeks onwards. Admittedly she started to have sleeping issues, exactly as you describe, shortly after being put in a spica cast for hip dysplaysia (sp?). I am however, not entirely convinced it was the sole cause to the start of her sleeping issues, as I think the start of separation anxiety had a bigger part in it.

In our experience (and please don't think I'm in anyway plugging controlled crying), I kept telling myself that it was just a phase and it would pass but I put up with it for 6 months and it became so bad that Hailey would make herself throw up if we tried to leave the room. We had no support around us and I had returned to work p/time and hubby was working long hours. We were getting no more than 3hrs sleep a night and that was mostly broken sleep - the worst kind of sleep! The longer down the road we got, the more desperate we were at attempts to get her to go to sleep i.e. patting her, rocking her, holding her, singing to her, lying in the room with her, walking her, driving her in the car, leaving the light on - we tried EVERYTHING! Sleep deprivation can do nasty things to you if you let it carry on for too long like we did.

In the end, after seeking lots and lots of advice from clinics and doctors, we seeked professional help and went to Tresillian. They do use a method of 'controlled crying' but are so supportive and won't do anything that you don't want them to do. I know there are people that don't agree with CC (as did we), but when you have nothing else that is working and you're not functioning as a person (or family) anymore, what else can you do but try. There are a couple of other places similar to Tresillian that provide help with sleeping issues but I think it depends where you're located. We were in Sydney at the time.

Anyway, I'm not in anyway saying that you should use CC, just that you should get someone to help you through it (take over whilst you have a couple of solid hours sleep) and have some sort of plan of attack to stick to, rather than our method pre-Tresillian, which was trying absolutley everything under the sun to get her to drop off to sleep, which I think probably confussed her and made her even more anxious. Once we stuck with a definite plan of attack, she came right within a week. It was amazing to see the difference. It was like a light switch went on and BAM, she was happy to go to bed awake and slept right through the night and has never turned back.

Also, where possible try to not encourage sleep by a means of you needing to be there i.e. patting etc....in our experience, it just lead us down a miserable path of her relying on us 100% to help her sleep. Perhaps try sitting in his bedroom, not looking at him until he drops off. Over a period of days you could start to move further and further away from the bed until you no longer need to stay in there.

Sorry for the long winded post.
Hope you get some sleep soon.
Cheers