I had made a baby sleep sac.
I am knitting a matching hat. ( first time making a baby hat )
as i was decreasing it got harder to do. I pulled the cord at the bottom of where i was working to give me more give when continuing to decrease. So i had equal number of stitches on each needle. I got almost to the end and it got too hard to pull the stitches off the needle. My fingers are now killing me lol
The hat is now ruined 
What can i do to make this easier?
Are you using the magic loop technique or are you trying to knit on a short circular needle. As you decrease sts it will become increasingly difficult with the short circular (say a 16" length). A technique like magic loop will work if you’re using a long enough circ.
See the technique and some other ways of small diameter circular knitting here:
http://www.knittinghelp.com/videos/advanced-techniques
I hope you can take out the last few rows of the hat and use one of these methods for the crown decreases.
Im using 16" circular
the pattern for decreasing is
K6, k2tog around
knit next round
k5, k2tog around
A 16" circ is too short for ML. You can use 2 circs (there’s a video here for how to do it) or use a longer circ and do ML or switch to dpn. Taking out some of it as salmonmac suggests should work once you have the right needles to do it.
So this is turning out to be more difficult than i thought
I was hoping to just be able to get it done with the 16" circ needles.
I even msgd the lady who posted the pattern to ask how she did it.
Looks like I may just skip the hat unfortunately.
Oh, as long as you’ve come this far, why not either buy another circ (could be a longer one) and knit with two circs as GG suggested and is shown in the video link? It’s probably the easiest solution although magic loop works well and so do dpns.
You’ve done most of the work already.
Yeah, you can set it aside until you have the needles you need for it. Frogging the whole thing would be too demoralizing.