My experience wasn’t really that painful. I had a sudden fever and back pain, and went to the ER to get antibiotics. Was surprised that after they confirmed the infection they said I needed a CT scan because it would be a huge deal if I had kidney stones to go with the infection. I did, and it was. Got admitted, spent a couple days there, got anesthesia and a stent put in my kidney.
Imagine a thin flexible silicon tube with a pigtail loop on each end. One end’s in your kidney, the other’s in your bladder. It opens up the flow so that the antibiotics can reach all the kidney tissue and all the urine can drain.
It’s not that explicitly painful but it still was my worst ever medical experience. Every second of the day, awake or asleep for 10 days, this stent in my tract was irritating the bladder tissues and activating all the signals that say “oh God, I have to pee RIGHT NOW!” It didn’t stop. What sleep I had was ridden with anxiety dreams about needing to pee.
The best I could do to manage this state was to hit the bathroom about every 15 minutes when awake and every hour when trying to sleep. After 10 days I had another anesthesia, and they removed the stent and broke up the stones. What extreme relief when that stent was gone!
Like most people, my stones were calcium oxalate. To avoid forming more stones, I had to change my whole diet. No almonds, spinach, etc. Minimal whole grains, greens, potatoes, chocolate!, nuts, beans. There’s an allowance for how much oxalate I can ingest in a day. I have a small bladder and literally pee every half hour during the work day due to all the water I have to drink (I even got out of jury duty for that). I drink a quart of milk daily to bind up as much of the oxalate in my system as possible with the calcium in the milk, and send it out safely through the GI tract instead of out the urinary tract.
There’s a good source for info on managing after stones at https://kidneystonediet.com/. I never paid for the counseling, but the lists there are very useful.
I don’t have much to add to the various stories here, but as a minor point of advice–if you don’t normally sit down to pee, consider doing so for the duration. It is possible for a sudden shock of pain to make your knees buckle, and the last thing you want to do in the wake of that is mop the floor.
I’ve had 3. The first was both the most painful and the smallest. they had to go in and yank it out. That went well but they put stints in which had to be removed later. That was done without anesthesia and it was not pleasant.
The last one I had was this year. I got online and looked up natural vasodialators and took everything I could get a hold of. I passed it early the next day.
I had one about a year and a half ago. Ended up in the ER. They thought it might be appendicitis given its location. A CAT scan revealed it (and other potential issues).
The pain was immense. They gave me something for it in the ER and I refused opioids (I had taken them once before and hated the side effects). The pain came back the next day, but it clears up into a dull ache the day after that. They also put me on a diuretic.
Evidently, the stone was a small one: 3mm. Any bigger and things would have been worse.
When I went to the ER they gave me morphine, with no discernible result. Then they tried more morphine and more of less than diddly squat resulted. Dilaudid did the trick.
It’s easy to find the list of foods to avoid in order to lower the chances of more stones. Nuts (except walnuts and pistachios) and dark green vegetables are at the top of it. I was abusing peanut butter for months before the stones made their presence known. That may have been a contributing factor. Surprisingly you can have dairy products except for yogurt.
Lithotripsy uses sound waves to break up the stones.
I had the enhanced type where they run a fiber optics scope up the urethra, through the bladder and into the kidney. The doctor can see the stones and break them up. It’s very precise.
It’s much better because there’s no incision.
Afterward the crushed stones passes. The doc gave me a strainer to catch the pieces for lab testing.
I had a ureteral obstruction which blocks the kidney from draining.
A couple of years ago I went to the ER with severe lower abdominal pain, and was told I had a kidney stone. Was given the usual advice, as well as a prescription of oxycodone for the pain I was going to have. I found out that unlike all of my other prescriptions I couldn’t have to have it delivered; I was scheduled to get my second Covid shot the next day, so I had my transport driver drop me off at CVS instead of my house afterwards. On the way to the bus stop from the CVS my legs suddenly got very wobbly and I collapsed. Fortunately a police car happened to pass by and the officer called an ambulance for me.
When I got to the ER they found that I had an infection from the kidney stone. They put a stent in and gave me another oxycodone prescription, which I was able to fill at the hospital before they sent me home. When I went back a week or two later to have the stent removed, in removing the stent the stone came out with it. So I was spared the pain of having to pass it.
According to the NHS website there are good treatments available:
Shock wave lithotripsy (SWL)
SWL involves using ultrasound (high-frequency sound waves) to pinpoint where a kidney stone is.
Ultrasound shock waves are then sent to the stone from a machine to break it into smaller pieces so it can be passed in your urine.
SWL can be an uncomfortable form of treatment, so it’s usually carried out after giving painkilling medication.
You may need more than 1 session of SWL to successfully treat your kidney stones.
Ureteroscopy
Ureteroscopy involves passing a long, thin telescope called a ureteroscope through the tube urine passes through on its way out of the body (the urethra) and into your bladder.
It’s then passed up into your ureter, which connects your bladder to your kidney.
The surgeon may either try to gently remove the stone using another instrument, or they may use laser energy to break it up into small pieces so it can be passed naturally in your urine.
Nope. I believe every awful word of it. I’m mostly just . . . disappointed? I keep thinking (hoping) medicine has advanced far enough to spare people that kind of torture. And I keep being wrong. Yow !
And yes, like you I’ve spoken to many women who have had both kids and kidney stones, and I have yet to find one who didn’t say that the stone hurt worse than labor.
They can operate on your heart with lasers but all they have for kidney stones is drink lots of water or a Mengele procedure. And to prevent a woman from getting pregnant put a balloon on your junk or have your sack cut open. Some of our medical care is still stuck in the stone age.
To me, the initial pain was always the worst part of it. I usually get prescribed some Flomax to help open up the ureters, and manage the pain mostly with ibuprofen (though I’m not above taking the good stuff they also prescribe if I need it. Within a few days, I usually feel it pass, and it rarely hurts when it does.
This last time had me concerned because of a problem that I wasn’t aware could happen, and apparently doesn’t happen to most people very often.
During a time when the meds were working, and I was feeling…amorous, the fiancee and I proceeded to get intimate. When that magic moment happened, my body went through all of the normal muscle contractions, but there was no…output (let us say).
Little disconcerting, but nothing major. Just a “hey…that’s weird.”
Except it kept happening for the better part of a week.
That was when I discovered that a kidney stone, if positioned just right, can block the flow of semen, and can cause you to not have any ejaculate when you orgasm.
Than you all for providing these helpful (and sometimes terrifying) anecdotes. It sounds like the awful stuff tends to be less common, though still possible. I shall continue hoping for the best.
My wife has been the lucky possessor of several, including a 35mm staghorn that was removed via tubeless percutaneous nephrolithotomy and another a few years later that blocked the ureter and basically killed that kidney. Ten days in hospital and a week in rehab, with a nephrostomy tube for several months while they dithered on whether the kidney had to come out. Ultimately she kept it, but it’s operating at vastly reduced capacity.
My barber gets them basically monthly. He’s had so many that he’s used to the pain; he’ll go to the ER and they say “This can’t be a stone, you’d be in more pain” and he says “Trust me, it’s a stone” and then they do the scan and say “Yep”.
Nothing she or he has tried has prevented recurrence, though she’s on potassium citrate now TID that MAY be helping. Hard to tell.
I had my first in 2013 and another in 2016. I was in my 60s. Fortunately, mine were small, both were 3mm and passed easily. The pain was, as others have stated, pretty awful until the stones reached my bladder.
After the 2nd one, my urologist (I already had a urologist, thank you my prostate!) told me to drink more water and drink lemonade every day. I have pretty much followed that. I drink things like Crystal Lite and diet citrus sodas. I think anything with citrates in it will help. It’s now been 8 years and counting. (Knock on wood!)
When I got my first one - by far the worst - I thought I was dying. I did not know a person could experience that much pain. Of course, the panic of not knowing what’s going on and why your abdomen feels like it’s exploding doesn’t help your mood.
When I had my first stone I went to the ER, because I obviously didn’t know what was happening to cause that much pain. After they diagnosed the stone, the doctor there told me that having a kidney stone is “the worst pain you can experience and survive”.
Agreed!!! The pain is at least 4 times as bad as childbirth and I didn’t have any anesthesia either when I delivered our daughter. The thing that helped was MORPHINE, oh sweet MORPHINE. I’d never had it before, heard them talk about it a lot on MASH and after that, I understood why they thought of morphine as magic.
