Pain won’t stop. Doctor not helping. Please help me figure this out!

Please bare with me. This is my first post, so a little background...

I suffer from a very debilitating case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and one of my main obsessions in my health. What’s been going on is completely weighing on my mind to a degree I cannot handle any longer, and I need help.

Last Tuesday night I started to develop a scratchy throat. I instantly got concerned, as my throat never hurts—even with a cold—unless I have strep throat, which I tend to get twice a year. I looked down the back of my throat, and low and behold, white spots! I saw my doctor promptly the next day.

My doctor looked down my throat and did a rapid strep test. The test came back negative and the doctor suspected that the spots I was seeing were tonsil stones—very likely, as I’ve been told by my ENT that I have many of these. She advised me that she thinks what I was experiencing was simple sinus drainage and to push liquids and to take Zyrtec and Mucinex.

By the next day, my throat was not only scratchy, but my tonsils felt like a truck was hitting them every time I swallowed. It’s been a week, and it’s felt l like that ever since, along with this same severe pain when swallowing in my ears/eustachian tubes. My throat actually no longer hurts on its own. It’s just when swallowing. The pain is SEVERE.

Over the weekend I was forced to go to an Urgent Care center, as I had developed bacterial pink eye. I’m on eye drops and am now symptom-less (is that a word?), but finishing up the bottle. I was also swabbed for flu at this time, and that, too, came back negative. The Urgent Care doctor was very obviously rushing to get home (he stated that the entire staff was waiting to leave) and didn’t even look in my ears! My throat actually doesn’t look red or bad at all when you look at it. Its for this reason that he didn’t believe I needed a further strep culture. It’s like, BEHIND the tonsils/in the neck that this pain is unbearable. So it doesn’t surprise me that my throat looks okay. He gave me a diagnosis of a viral upper respiratory infection after barely looking me over. (How could VIRAL URI give me BACTERIAL pink eye?)

Other symptoms are stuffy/dry nose, hacking cough, coughing up yellow mucus. Occasional pressure in my teeth. Itchy ears. I’ve had no fever throughout the entire thing.

My doctor’s keep telling me that this is a virus and refusing to give me any medicine. They just keep telling me to push Mucinex and liquids like I’m drowning. They’ve been telling me this for a week now, and my symptoms haven’t budged. In fact, they’ve worsened. And when they originally saw me, all I felt was a tiny scratch in my throat. I didn’t have any of these symptoms. I have an appointment tomorrow. They keep dismissing me as an anxiety case on the phone and not taking my level of pain seriously. I’m at a loss of what to do to ease my mind. I can not afford to go back to Urgent Care, and I mentally cannot afford to sit in an Emergency Room (worst OCD nightmare).

Does anyone have any idea if it’s normal for me to be having this disturbingly painful swallowing for this long? I’ve never experienced painful swallowing without strep. And definitely never for this long. I’m in agony.

// side note: I have no idea if this has anything to do with it, but the Friday before showing any symptoms (onset late-Tuesday evening), we tried a new kitty litter formula in the house. The odor this produced was so strong and overbearing that it was making me gag. I had to go out in the middle of the night to buy new just to get rid of it, as it overran the entire apartment. Other people in the household smelled it and thought it was strong, but it seemed to affect me the worst. I was VERY sensitive to the smell. Even with it gone, I continued to smell it all through the night and the entire next day. I didn’t know if any chemicals in that stuff could have possibly triggered all of this. //