Crap. This is gonna hurt. She said they could probably blast it with lithotripsy, but I’ll probably need a stent for 2 or 3 days. I’ve never had one of those and find the idea unappealing.
I had a 13 mm stone in 1988, for which they did a lithotomy, with a ten day hospital stay, a 7" scar on my flank, and a good 8 weeks out of work. Maybe this stone is in a better place, or maybe lithotripsy is way better now (if it was even available then). I’ve never had a stone bigger than the 13, and the second biggest was only 9, which was bad enough.
I’ve had forty something stones over the years. In addition to that one lithotomy, I’ve had enough cystoscopies and lithotripsies to have lost count of each. And, many times, passed the stones on my own. Between this and the back and neck surgeries, I’ve unfortunately acquired some opioid tolerance, too. But, jeez, 17 mm. That’s 2/3 of an inch. I’m feeling this is uncharted territory for me.
That is near the point where they stop giving asteroids numbers, and start slapping names on them. May they zap the thing to dust as painlessly as possible!
I had two (similar size), several years ago, removed using lasers. It was an outpatient procedure through the urethra, no scar. The stent was left in for several days and then removed in the urologists office. The stent just made you feel like you have to urinate all the time. I went snow skiing with the stent in a day after the procedure. No ill effects. Actually the skiing took my mind off the feeling to urinate.
Well, team, great news! They sent me for a CT scan to get a more detailed understanding of shape to plan the procedure, and found no big stone! What they thought was a stone turned out to be a chance alignment of several shadowy things, an artifact of X-ray being a shadowgraph from along one dimension only. I have some <2 mm stones and some other calcification, but no big stones that need treatment. I’m off the hook! so to speak.
Most of the stones over the years were analyzed and those were all calcium oxalate. I’ve also done 24 hour urine collections, three times I think, quite a few years apart (my first stone was in 1979). I understand I fall into a fairly large category of people who form stones for reasons not known.
I do take a magnesium and citrate ion supplement in a fairly high dose, which for several years has kept the formation rate way down. Before that I was taking a med called “Polycitra” that also helped, but tended to cause muscle cramps. Before that, I was a candidate for a surgery that moves the kidneys down and attaches them directly to the bladder, so there is no tiny ureter and the stones form right in the bladder, where it’s easier to get them out. However I think I’m doing so much better these days that surgery is no longer getting talked about. I do drink a lot of water and just downed another liter while sitting at the computer this afternoon. I’ve had four urologists now – they keep moving to bigger cities to practice, except the one that got caught fondling patients and lost his license. My current urologist, whom I’ve seen for probably about 8 years, I like a great deal.
I metabolize calcium oddly, I think. I form osteophytes and have some calcified areas in my body including the urinary tract and the coronary arteries. But I’ve also had trouble with low bone density and did an osteoporosis treatment for maybe 3 years (however I was a little below the technical threshold for osteoporosis).
I think new investigations are probably going to be driven by some new technology improvement, or else by a change in how I form stones.
Never had a kidney stone, but as I understand it, this would involve the oh-so-fun peeing into a tea strainer :eek: (my late BIL had to do that for a bit - not sure whether it was to detect the composition, or just to see if he’d passed one).
Napier, glad to hear that boulder was just a shadow!!
I think that drinking more water is probably your best bet for stone prevention. How pedestrian! I like putting people on fancy potassium citrate cocktails to reduce their stones.
Good luck, glad you don’t have a huge goober in there.
Got a recipe for your potassium citrate cocktails for a 140 pound female with calcium oxalate crystals in her urine? Does it contain lemon juice?
A few years ago I had a sonogram done for a lypoma and they found a 6mm stone in my left kidney. The doc didn’t say anything about it. A year before that they did a blood test and I had white blood cells in my urine and he asked me if I had a bladder infection, but I wasn’t having any pain, I said no, he put me on an antibiotic anyway. I asked for a copy of the blood test and they gave me the results of the urine test by mistake. It wasn’t until I started looking stuff up that I saw they found calcium oxalate crystals. Since then I’ve cut back on the foods with oxalates and really upped the water intake. My thyroid is fine. I’m going to look for a new doctor soon and stop running on luck.
I’ve had one once and the strainer was to capture it when it passed. I gave up on it after a week and a week later I felt something shoot out and heard a ping off the porcelain of the urinal. I fished it out–eww, and being a lab tech, took some pictures with a stereoscope.
It was slightly bigger than a pea (heh) and globular on one side where I assume it was embedded. The other half of it looked like miniature stacks of broken crystal glass panes. Ouch.