It feels as if my bone is sticking out behind my ear. not breaking the skin or anything but a hard bone-like bump and its extremely painful. any ideas?

Mastoid bone: Sometimes a middle ear infection can spread to the Mastoid bone of the skull. Symptoms of Mastoiditis could be drainage from the ear along with pain or discomfort, fever, headache, hearing loss, redness of the ear and/or behind the ear that may cause ear to stick out.

Mastoid Inflammation: The area behind the ear is called Mastoid bone and it can become infected or inflamed. It is best to seek medical attention to determine what may be going on

This is the mastoid: The mastoid is part of the temporal bone, It can get infected, which may cause fever and sever pain. Your symptoms may be related to a chronic problem in your ear or mastoid, but could be neurogenic also or not infected. We typically will do a CT of the temporal bones to evaluate this more completely. My recommendation would be to be seen by an ENT doctor about this.