If it hurts why do you keep doing it?

so back in February i had hurt my thumb lifting groceries, well it was more the tendon that moves your thumb.  i ending up having to get a cortisone injection to get movement of my thumb back.  i have been doing physical therapy ever since.  i bring this up only because i feel that for a person that doesn't have OCD you probably wouldn't engage in behaviors that would aggravate your conditions.  Well that isn't the case for me.  I was stress cleaning our bed room last night and had taken my protective brace off because i felt that it was slowing me down.  i should have kept it on because yet again I have further injured my hand by doing rituals.  That wasn't the first time that it has happened nd it won't be the last i am sure, and that realization scares me.  i will give you another example.  Back in April i got contact lenses and on the first day i was already ritualizing over them.  i was trying to get the lenses out at the end of the evening and successfully got one lens out but not the other (or so i thought).  i spent two hours trying to get the lens i thought was stuck in my eye out.  I tried everything, rinsing it out, blinking, and the two fingered pinch approach.  Forty five minutes into it i was almost in tears from the pain i had caused myself going after the contact lens.  Finally my fiance looked in and saw what i was doing and came it and held my hands down until i stopped trying to get at my eye.  well then we went to bed and by we i mean he.  i stayed up trying to get the contact lens out, i finally stopped when i almost passed out from the pain.  the dawn brought my a left eye with broken blood vessels and conjunctivitis.  I had to go to the urgent care clinic and they gave me antibiotics and told me in addition that i had scratched my cornea.  When they asked me what happened all i could answer was i thought that the contact lens was still swtuck in my eye and i had to get it out.  the nurse asked me well didn't it hurt?...Yes it did....If it hurts why do you keep doing it?  I said I have OCD, if i am ritiualizing and it is causing me pain there is a slim to none chance that it will stop me.  she just looked at me and all she could say was well you really shouldn't do that you should just try to stop when that starts to happen.  yeah right, if i could stop the rituals i would is what i wanted to scream at her, but instead i kept my mouth shut. 

it is the same thing that my father tells me to do, he just keeps saying you just need to relax and calm down and not do those things.  it hurts because it is so clear to me that he doesn't understand at all what is going on inside of my head.  i know that i can't expect everyone to understand what is going on inside of my head but i wouldn't have thought that he would have at least read the Wikipedia entry about ocd.

there is a driving force inside of my head that eggs me on to continue these certain behaviors however painful they might be.  when i am stuck in a checking ritual, especially checking the locks (which at my worst including getting up 40 times a night to check that the door was in fact locked) there is no rationality or reality in any of it.  I am in a desperate scramble to make sure i have done something perfectly and that i will not be the reason that someone comes into the house and kills me or my fiance or our three rabbits or our fish or the list goes on....  It is all to just feel in control of what is going on around me. My thoughts are always filled with What If questions that always have some devastating horrific answer, why wouldn't i try to prevent these horribly possibilities from happening.