Your situation certainly has parallels to mine. I agree with Eric, you should get the FNA. I had no tooth pain, no ear pain, just the big ol' walnut. And then during surgery they found a second smaller infected node which had been too small for me to feel.

Oh and the idea of doing rads after surgery, according to my RO and ENT both, is to kill any microscopic malignancies. They blast the whole field, basically (I know it's more complicated than that and the computer maps the whole thing out during the prep phase of IMRT, but that's how I think of it) and at the end, voila, no more bad cells.

Very often they do concurrent chemo although not in my case. That would be something for your team to evaluate. Assuming you have cancer. Which you don't yet know.

We're here to help. Eric is the best.