I'm very sorry to hear about your medical situation. I agree that RF and RHD are very serious ... my comment was only to say that treatment of a (frequently) self-resolving condition with 10 days of strong antibiotics has been an ongoing topic of debate due to the likely contribution to antibiotic resistance among other concerns. Here's a representative editorial from a few years ago:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1949249/

Your condition is the reason that I find myself prescribing courses of amox even when chances of chronic strep colonization are much more likely than true acute infection. It's a real diagnostic quandary.