Well, that was maybe not the way anybody wants to end the 4th of July weekend, because on Sunday night, I had horrible pains in my side and back nad my brother took me to the emergency room. Now, I’ve got a very high pain threshhold, so it took a lot for me to get to that point. I REALLY wanted to call 911 and almost did, but I still had some ability for rational thought, and I kept thinking of how much extra that would cost. I was crying and screaming and I couldn’t see where I was going and I’m not sure I even knew where I was, and I was put in a room right away with an IV and then got a CAT scan.
So it turned out that I have kidney stones. I haven’t had them before and I don’t have a family history or anything like that, but it could be because it’s a side effect some people do get from one of the meds I take for epilepsy. The ER people sent me home and told me to wait and see if it resolved itself on its own. I"m in the middle of it all right now-- it’s NOT over-- but I took some Percoset an hour ago, which is why I"m able to sit and type this right now. Everyone I’ve talked to who’s had a KS says it’s the worst pain they’ve ever experienced. The only reason I won’t say it’s the worst for me is that I was in a head-on collision many years ago where I broke almost every bone, had 10 operations, spent 3 months in the hospital, and had over 2 years of rehab. So nothing really measures up to that!
I would really like people to share what their experiences have been with this entire problem. Thanks!
I have passed 9 kidney stones (the latest about a month ago), and have had multiple ER visits for this. I will say this: these days they are usually pretty quick about getting pain meds in you, and a CT scan is infinitely preferable to the old way of checking for them, a procedure called an IntraVenous Pyelogram (IVP for short), where they inject a dye into your system, wait for you to start excreting it, and take xrays to see where the stones are.
The mechanism involved has to do with the tenderness of kidneys and the spasming of the muscles around them as the stone exits the kidney, or as the fluid in that kidney backs up behind the stone as it travels down the ureter to the bladder. So if you can manage to relax through pain-relief, it usually ends the cycle. I found in the case of two stones I didn’t treat at the ER that, if you get into a darkened room, take a strong pain med, and find some way of relaxing or distracting yourself, the pain can be made to go away. Being really, really tired helps, since you have a tendency then just to go to sleep instead.
Oh, and ask your doctor if you can take Flomax. It helps open up the ureters and makes progression of the stone faster.
I have had kidney stones many times over the years, I’ve lost track of how many times. Yes, they are extremely painful. Just about every attack I’ve had was enough to send me to the emergency room. In my cases, the pain lasts anywhere from a few minutes to several hours per attack.
Most of the stones were small enough for me to pass on their own (they look like a small piece of brown gravel). However, one time I had one that was aprox. 9mm, and they had to use sound waves to blast it into pieces small enough for me to pass. This is called “Lithotripsy”. To do this, they put you out, and put you in a large tank of water, and then direct sound waves at your kidney in order to break the stone apart. The big stone gets blasted into a bunch of smaller stones that will pass out more easily, but passing all these stones is still very painful. I’ve heard that once you have stones more than once or twice, it’s very likely that you will continue to get them throughout your life. Seems to be true in my case! :eek:
It’s been going on for almost three days, and nothing has really changed. The doctor’s office is supposed to call me back to set up an appointment for an X-ray and to do whatever they’re going to do next. I"m not sure if I should be doing something else right now or not. If I wasn’t taking Percocet, I think there’s no way I could possibly be staying at home instead of being in the hospital! Anyway, I really appreciate everyone’s input.
I had one. That was enough, I had to be carried from a movie theater on a stretcher. I tried to make it out on my own when the pain started but only got a few feet before being unable to move at all. Yeah, the worst pain ever.
I had been out riding my motorcycle all day, so when I got a pain in my back around 7pm I thought it was just sore from sitting on my bike all day.
By 8:00 the pain was excruciating! It radiated from by back to under my stomach and down into my left testicle. At 8:30 I crawled into West Allis Memorial Hospitals emergency room, slapped my drivers license and insurance card on the desk and screamed “it’s all current. Help! Fucking help!” and dropped to the floor. It felt like someone was stabbing me in the back with a red hot knife down into my nut bag. The pain was intolerable!
X-rays showed I had a stone 11mm stuck in my urethra.:eek: But the fun was only beginning.
They put a stent up me to to insure urine flow and hold the stone in place. This reduced the pain the stone was causing by about 50%, but the stent itself made my bladder have spasms. So 24 hours a day I felt like I had a real full bladder even though I didn’t. VERY UNCOMFORTABLE feeling.
They had to wait 4 days for me to heal after inserting that stent. On the fourth day they used sound waves to blast the stone to smithereens. I didn’t feel anything while they did it as I was in drug induced “twilight”.
For a week after that I peed out the little bits of stone. Some hurt coming out, most didn’t. But I still had that stent in me causing the bladder spasms.
Taking the stent out is a real fun day…NOT! The doctor sticks a device up your urethra that looks amazing like the claw in an arcade Crane game. Using a little scope he looks up your schtick and uses a crank to fish that stent out of you. When the stent is being pulled out it looks like a freaking alien coming out of your dink. It’s full of blood and goop, and it hurts like a mo-fo! After that it burns like crazy when you urinate for about a week.
That was the only stone I’ve ever had. I can think of 50 other painful things I’d rather go through!
I had one when I was in my mid 20s. I hurts so much, the only way I can describe it was, that the pain just quit hurting.
Fortunately mine passed quickly, but I have known people that had to sit in the tub of water and get the waves sent through their body to dissolve them
I had one in college. Hurt like a mofo, and gave me a constant need to urinate, even though there was nothing in my bladder. Doctor’s office needed a urine sample so they made me drink lots of water which made the d*mn thing hurt even worse.
My doctor told me off the record that the best thing to do is drink lots of beer. As it was they put me on a saline and sugar IV which, combined with the pain meds, made me feel very good.
Boy was I mad when I saw how small the d*mn thing was.
Today, I drank 12 cups of water and… ahem… well, one turned out okay. (Do I have to go into details, or can everybody figure out what I mean?) There were still two more in my left kidney on the CAT scan, though. Has anybody had any experience with that (additional kidney stones that hadn’t yet made it down to the point where they made their presence known)? If so, what happened? Did they appear a short time later, or much later, or never, or what?
I thought I threw my back out. The pain was the same. When I realized I couldn’t get comfortable I realized it was something else. I tried to drive to the hospital at 4am and got as far as a children’s hospital where the security guard found me next to the car. They gave me morphine and transferred me to another hospital.
I waited 2 weeks for them to pass and when they didn’t I had them removed. I started out with demerol then went to percocet and then vicodin. The procedure included a stent and was done under anesthesia. The stent removal wasn’t the most pleasant experience and I’m here to tell you it pays to have a seasoned doctor remove it. You want it done as efficiently as possible. What I wasn’t prepared for was the pain of going to the bathroom afterwords. Owweeee that hurt.
It is likely that you will soon have another attack. But it isn’t always the case that the other stone(s) will release quickly. Of mine, three times I got them sequentially one side, then the other; three times I got a single stone followed by nothing for a few years.
It’s hard to talk about this and keep the language to GQ level and not that of the Pit.
I’ve had a kidney stone, a broken nose, really bad toothaches, and extreme gout outbreaks in my [almost] 49 years. They all suck, especially while they’re happening. But the worst has to be the kidney stone. I know women get them too, but the burning, stabbing pain in my testicle has to trump child birth. In fact, the few woman I know that have had kidney stones have told me it is worse than child birth!!!
I’ve passed a total of five at irregular intervals, from about 1995 to 2008. All were apparently less than 5mm in diameter, although I’ve never successfully caught one to examine. Despite not having one to analyze, the assumption by my urologist was that they were mainly calcium and I was told that the sonic shattering procedure was not a viable option. Drinking of Paris tap water over several years (in coffee and tea I made at home), apparently high in calcium, may have been a contributing factor to their formation.
First one was the largest, and took something like five months from first movement to expulsion. I had five or six major episodes of pain spasms during that time, somewhat moderated by strong anti-inflammatories, but made at least three emergency room trips for that one alone. It was truly miserable. The rest have come out over time periods from most of a day to a week or so.
As for the pain, particularly from the first one: in 2005 I broke both bones in my right arm, near the wrist, while I was at work. As I was laying there waiting for assistance, I thought to myself, “you know, this doesn’t hurt anywhere near as bad as those kidney stones”.
NC is supposed to be a very big area for kidney stones. The theory is a lot of them come from drinking sweet iced tea which is big here so you might want to cut that out if you drink it.
My kidney stone story. In August of 2007 I was mowing the lawn on a very hot day when I came into the house to pee. When I tried to go nothing came out but blood. I have to say I was in a state of shock, naturally this was not good and something was very wrong. I went to the hospital and was diagnosed with a bladder infection and put on antibiotics. Two weeks later I still had blood in my urine and placed ABs again for two weeks.
After a month no blood! Good, Problem solved, yes. No. Then one day I had to pee again and the blood was back and I had an excruciating pain in my lower back that doubled me over, I have never felt such pain. Went to the hospital and they did a CAT scan ($8,000) and found out I had two stones, one in the kidney and one on the way to the bladder, this one was the one giving me trouble. No treatment except Rush Limbaugh’s fix until it passed 10 days later. The second stone two weeks after that. After the stone passed a chemical analysis was done it was determined I don’t drink enough water (the joys of 24hr urine collecting) and my pH was screwed up. Now I am on Sodium Bi-carb tablets and drink two quarts of water a day. I have had no problems since then. Knock on Wood.
Anise, mine came out of the blue, like yours did. I had them in both kidneys. The pain was the worst thing I’ve ever felt. Some were too big to pass so I had a lithotripsy, which these days replaces cutting surgery. God bless modern medicine. The stones came back on my right side, several times, two or three more lithotripsies. I gradually lost kidney function, and the kidney was removed.
Those stones were all calcium based. I was clean for quite a while, then got stones on the left again, these went undetected by the X-ray because they were uric acid based, but a deeper scan found them. Another lithotripsy, and I spent several days in the hospital with a tube into my kidney, with a solution flushing them out. Now I take Allipurinol, to prevent the buildup of uric acid. Most folks who take that med have gout, but I’m one of the minority who take it for something else.
IANAD, but if you have any questions feel free to PM or email. It was the pain on that first night that scared me the most, not knowing what was going on. After the problem was identified and I could have a painkiller, I got, for the first and last time so far, Demerol, and after that stuff I can understand how folks get hooked on drugs. I felt so good! We don’t know how good the simple lack of pain feels, until we hurt so bad. Make sure you get a really good urologist. I’m glad I did.
I am also on Allipurinol for this same reason. However, I have had stones since being on the medication, so it isn’t a guarantee that you will stop getting them, although maybe not as frequently or as large.
And when other doctors see the meds I take, they usually assume I have gout because of the Allipurinol.
My first one was eight years ago, and the pain was so bad I was throwing up. Because the doctors weren’t sure what was going on, and the pain was on my lower right side, they yanked my appendix. Better safe than sorry, I suppose, but imagine everyone’s surprise when a year later I suddenly had a recurrence of my “appendicitis” on the other side! That’s when a scan showed a couple of small stones in my ureter and some graininess in my renal pelvis. That’s also when my Mom told me she had kidney stones in her early 20s too.
I keep getting small attacks, but nothing as bad as those first two in years. I was on some heavy-duty pain meds for a little while back then, and I had a lithotripsy procedure done. It didn’t hurt, quite, but it was like someone shuffling around on a carpet in their wool socks and zapping my abdomen with static electricity. Twice a second. For what seemed like hours.
What I don’t understand is why I was in so much pain from relatively small stones. The biggest one I had (that I know of) was only about 5mm, and that was busted up with the lithotripsy. Everything else has been like big grains of sand, and yet I’ll have back pain and frequent urges to pee and sometimes blood in my urine. I’m drinking a lot more now, to try and help prevent more stones, so the “incidents” aren’t as frequent lately. Maybe twice a year or so, I’ll feel like I have something going on.
Wish I knew what the stones were made of, so I could try and be more careful about my diet and prevent them. I submitted a stone for analysis but they managed to lose it somehow on its way to the special lab.
