iPhone 5s stuck in recovery mode, can't update or restore

Hi!

This is the dilemma I face: I recently came home from an overseas holiday and for whatever reason my iPhone 5s wouldn't pick up my carrier again. Upon googling it was suggested to update my phone so I did so by connecting it to my computer and updating through iTunes. Half way through updating, something went wrong and the update failed leaving my phone in this "recovery mode", aka paperweight. The screen simply tells me to connect the phone to iTunes and I can't do anything else with the phone itself. When I connect to iTunes, I get the options to try to update it again, or if that fails, to factory reset. I have tried BOTH options numerous times and each time they get to a point where the progress bar on the phone screen is about 60% of the way across before iTunes spits out an error message along the lines of "encountered an unexpected error. Could not update/restore (error message -1)"

I tried to contact Apple support to which I was intelligently told "we'll call you" on my phone which won't work to talk about my phone which won't work. Well done Apple. I've updated iTunes, I've turned off my firewalls and anti virus while doing the update/restore, I've restarted both my phone and computer approx. 124 times each, I've done Windows updates, I've tried different USB ports.

Please, someone tell me that there is a solution because otherwise despite how much I hate it, I'll be going Android.

Thank you.