DFU mode without sleep/wake button?

Ok, so this is probably the worst combination of things to occur. If you don't care about reading the story I'm looking for a way to put my phone into DFU mode without the sleep/wake button. If there is a way to do this please let me know - if you want to know why I need to do this, read below... Thanks.

Last week my sleep wake button mysteriously stopped working. For a time it would work with every 5th or 6th press, but now it doesn't work at all. So for the past week I've had to forgo the use of the sleep/wake button, which means that when I'm done using my phone I had to put it into my pocket and hope I didn't hit anything until it shut itself off.

It's been manageable, but I have dreaded the day that my iPhone froze or anything, because I have effectively no way to restart the the device. Turns out that day was this evening - it froze while I was in Gmail, and I was unable to do anything. Home button was non-responsive - basically the whole OS locked up. Now obviously if I had a working sleep/wake button I could have probably held down both that and the home screen and forced the iPhone to restart - clearly I don't have that option in this case...

Worse yet, I decided to try to fix my sleep/wake button, so I took my phone apart. I wasn't able to really figure out what was going on with the sleep/wake button, and while I had the case cracked open it died. Once I got everything plugged in again, the phone turned back on, and sat at the Apple logo screen for a long time, after which it superimposed a spinning wheel over top of the logo. Truth be told, I don't think that disconnecting the screen had anything to do with the spinning wheel, I think it's a result of the OS completely locking up (the likes of which I've never seen the iPhone do before... so something in the OS must have become corrupted... at least that's my theory anyway).

It has been/continues to be stuck in this loop. I'm not sure whether letting the device die and naturally resetting itself will do the trick. I'm leaning towards the idea that it probably won't help the situation. I have not yet tried to do a restore, because I'm worried that it won't work, and then I'll lose my backup as well.

So yah... does anyone know how to force the iPhone into DFU mode without the sleep/wake button?

 

UPDATE:

Just after posting this message my iPhone screen went completely white. It is no longer even registering in iTunes in the first place. I think I'm really screwed now... Anyone have any idea how to get it out of this white screen of death without being able to reset it? Should I just let the battery die, then hope it doesn't happen again?

 

It's about 160 off of warranty. There is nothing Apple could do, except have me send the phone in and pay to fix it.

In retrospect I guess it would have been the smarter move since my only option now seems to be to buy a new phone.

The white screen went black, and now the phone will not charge altogether. So I guess that's that...