Abdominal pain, gurgling, mild cough & swollen lymph nodes in throat. Serious? Or just stress?

Hi everyone. I've decided to post here in hopes that someone might be able to shed some light on some symptoms I've begun to encounter this past week. I'm a borderline hypochondriac, so these symptoms have caused me a great deal of anxiety this week, but I'm not sure if the symptoms are the cause or the effect.

Monday night I began getting a "pain" in my upper left abdomen, and has been there ever since. It's only in one specific location, literally as if you were to draw a line directly down from the left nipple, intersected with a line drawn directly left from the navel. It doesn't hurt to push on it, there doesn't seem to be any swelling or hernia-like bulging. At first I thought I cramped a muscle because of the way I was sitting at the time when it suddenly started. It's not a constant pain, and it isn't even very sore. The best way I can describe it is that it feels like I'm being poked in the stomach with the stick-end of a broom, and in some ways feels like a feeling of "fullness". The pain comes and goes, and when it comes, it literally lasts seconds, then goes away for anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes. It doesn't matter if I'm sitting or standing, though I don't seem to experience it much when I'm lying down (it isn't noticeable enough to keep/wake me up at night).
Along with the mild pain, however, I find my abdomen to "gurgle" quite often, as if I'm hungry, even AFTER I've eaten (sometimes it's actually worse). At the same time, my appetite hasn't been very good all week. On Wednesday I didn't eat ANYTHING until dinner that evening, and last night while at a restaurant with friends, I was barely even able to eat any of my meal, yet I didn't have any problems with drinks, and was able to polish off an appetizer an hour earlier. I have yet to eat much of anything today.
The lack of appetite has actually been an ongoing issue since I was sick with what I assume was a Flu back in February; my appetite hasn't been great since then, and have noticed the "gurgling" periodically since then.
Bowels have had a lot of diarrhea. Last couple of days it's been almost orange in color (I can't recall eating anything orange in color, though I do take Vitamin C every night before going to bed, but I've been doing that much longer than I've been dealing with this). Today it seems to be more it's regular color, perhaps even with a slight green tinge.

A few weeks ago I was having pretty bad heartburn. Pepto seemed to help, but the heartburn was bad enough that it would wake me up. The heartburn seems to have gone away, though I still get mild bouts of it. Still, I can't help but wonder if it could somehow be related to what I'm feeling now.
Subsequently, I've also been battling a mild cough. I attributed it to the continually changing weather we get here or allergies, as well as how much I've been smoking lately & that I sometimes burn incense in my basement office. The cough isn't serious, it sometimes produces small amounts of phlegm, and it's almost always clear, no real 'color' to it at all. This might have no relation to the abdominal pain/lack of appetite at all, but thought it was a little strange since the cough seemed to come after/during the heartburn episodes.

I'm also finding that my lymph nodes under my jaw are swollen and even seems to be causing me some difficulty in swallowing. There are mornings that I gag several times because it feels like my throat is not as open as it should be. Sometimes it almost seems like my cough is the result of my throat feeling swollen. My throat is not sore. I've thought that part of my inability to eat could be because of difficulty swallowing due to the swollen lymph nodes in my throat.

This week my doctor diagnosed me with high blood pressure (I did not address these symptoms with him at the time), which has admittedly caused me some stress and anxiety. I've been under a lot of stress/anxiety from work projects & deadlines as well.
I've thought that this could be a mild ulcer as a result of stress. A few years ago when I was under pressure to get a project done for a client, I often found myself with the same "swollen throat" symptom, but my abdomen seemed to be fine. I've had nervous stomach in the past, but it seemed to be more painful than what I'm experiencing now, and certainly didn't involve pain in one specific spot like this.

Part of be believes this could all be stress/anxiety-related, but the hypochondriac in me was convinced earlier this week that it was cancer based on the things I was reading online. Of course, that would only cause more stress/anxiety and continue the vicious cycle. I've also thought that maybe I simply pulled something in my abdomen to cause the pain, and the lack of appetite is simply the result of stress/anxiety.

I don't feel like my symptoms are bad enough to send me to the ER, far from actually, but they have really "taken the wind out of my sails" and I've been more down & depressed in the last few days than I have been the last several months.


Apologies for the long-winded post, but I figure attention to detail is important for things like this. Anyone have any experience with similar symptoms or have any thoughts on all this?