Five years ago I gave birth to my third child. It was a girl and I was delighted. She never slept through the night. Her pediatrician told us it was colic and reflux. However, nothing soothed her. Night after night, she would scream and cry, and all I could do was hold her and rock her. My husband and I would take turns. Finally, after about three hours of crying, she would fall asleep for a while, but she never developed a definite sleep pattern.

As she grew older and became more verbal, the crying at night turned into more of a fight in her sleep. She never woke during these crying fits. I began to think she might be suffering from some sort of seizure disorder. Her pediatrician agreed to have testing done on her, and all the tests came back normal. But she was still having fits at night, sometimes screaming at the top of her lungs. I was terrified at what was happening to her. She was just a baby. I wanted to help her so badly, but there was nothing I could do. I tried everything. If I got close to her, she kicked and hit and she wasn't even awake. This continued every night. I knew there was something seriously wrong.

At about 16 months, she began to have temper tantrums that lasted for several hours. As she got older, they became more severe. She began to throw things, hit kick, spit, anything she could do. She never wanted to be in her car seat – she would try to get out and punch me in the head while I was driving, nearly causing a car accident. At this point she was about two years old.

We kept taking her back to her pediatrician, and we were told it was the "terrible twos." When she turned three, it was called the "treacherous threes." The pediatrician did say there might be something wrong, but he didn’t want to label a child with anything severe until he was sure it wasn't a developmental issue.

Despite my cries for help, my daughter’s rages continued to get worse. Finally when she was three years old, I found a nurse practitioner who diagnosed her with bipolar disorder. The nurse explained that the sleep disturbances that looked like seizures were actually night terrors.

We were unable to continue treatment with the nurse because we were never able to make it to appointments. My daughter would pour water all over herself (in the middle of winter) or take off her clothes and kick and fight about getting in her car seat, or anything that would prevent us from leaving. I had to chase her all over the house, inside and out. One day she was in the car with me, driving down a highway at 50 mph. She got out of her car seat, began to hit me, and as I was trying to pull over, she opened up the car door to jump out. She was laughing the entire time but also being very angry and aggressive toward me. I managed to pull over safely, hanging on to her for dear life.

We were lucky enough to find another good therapist and psychiatrist. This began the endless search for a medication combination that was effective. She went through trials of medications that I can't even name here because there were so many. We soon found that we had to learn a new language, because "no" was a trigger to set her off in to a rage. Lack of results led us to hospitalize her. She had made several more attempts to jump out of a moving vehicle, which pretty much confined us to the home. The final straw was when she was outside playing while her father was mowing the grass. In a second, before he could stop her, she had run into the garage, gotten the gasoline for the mower and dumped it all over herself.

She spent three weeks in the hospital. It was a structured environment, and we were only allowed to visit her for an hour a day. It was horrible being away from her – she’s our baby. But we knew it had to be this way until she received treatment that got her symptoms under control. Eventually she was prescribed an antipsychotic and a medication for ADHD. All in all, it has helped, but we still struggle with different doses and different combinations because she hasn't been responding well. What seemed to work at first still needs fine-tuning.

She doesn't suffer from the night terrors any longer, but the aggression, impulsiveness and hyperactivity are still a problem. She is now five years old and weighs 80 pounds. That is another health hazard, since she is very strong and can throw a coffee table about five feet across the room. We have found the treatment called sensory integration to be very helpful. We now have a physical therapist and occupational therapist who work with her to develop strength in her weak areas. We are still in the process of exploring different medication options.