Hello I am brand new to this forum, I am doing this through my phone so please forgive any typos.
I was doing a search on the internet for kidney stone pain and some threads came up from this site, I hope I am posting in the right spot.
I am male 40 years old, this morning I woke up with a incredibly painful pressure pain in my lower back, the pressure and pain only increased as time went by. I started feeling sick to my stomach and sweeting.
Wife had to take me to the E.R. they did a urine test that showed blood and a cat scan that shows a 5.7 mm kidney stone on my left side. I forget what it’s called but the stone is in the tube between the kidney and bladder almost halfway to the bladder the Dr said.
The er Dr said anything under 6mm will pass on their own, is this true? He gave me some pain meds and some tamsulosin.
I have never had one of these before, can someone please tell me how bad this is going to hurt when it finally comes out? Are there any warning signs before it comes out? How long does it normally take?
I am supposed to drink lots of water and pee through a strainer.
Kidney Stones hurt like hell, worse than anything else a man will experience. They do pass if small, I found a few beers help but I’m sure that is not supported medically. I’ve passed 3 stones. I try to avoid ever dehydrating as that is what kicks off my episodes.
My sisters has given birth twice, had Kidney Stones and Gallstones. She is also an RN for the last 40 years. She told me that kidney stones were almost as bad as given birth and worse than anything else she has gone through.
The first time I was in complete panic as I had no idea what was going on and I was only 25. I did this weird little self-check. *“Oh shit, I’m having a heart attack. No wait, the pain is in my back, in fact it is my kidney, oh shit my kidney collapsed.” *Of course kidneys don’t collapse but it was like 2am and I was in crazy pain.
The pain killer barely helped, I found myself in the ER pounding on the wall it hurt so badly. It took 2 days for the damn stone to pass and that was only after 2 beers.
Once it passes, find out what type of stone you have and what diet changes will avoid future stones. Stay hydrated.
Good luck, I sympathize greatly with what you’re going through.
I’ve had three kidney stones, each of which passed with only minimal discomfort, basically nausea. My brother and sister, on the other hand, were not so fortunate.
So, while kidney stones can be incredibly painful, they are not universally so.
I’ve had kidney stones, and while it was unpleasant, and yes, painful, I wouldn’t call it the worst pain I’ve ever had. My sprained ankle was worse pain than my kidney stones. And I wouldn’t call my sprained ankle the worst pain either.
I’d have to say the hormonal joint pains I got from menopause were the worst pains I ever had.
I think there’s a new thread subject available here.
If the doctor says under 6 will pass, then I believe it will. My two were 3 mm and passed easily. When they are in the ureters (tubes between kidneys and bladder) and moving, they will be very painful. When a stone finally arrives in your bladder, you should feel no more pain. There was no pain when I passed mine, they just showed up in the strainer. I’m male by the way, not sure how it is for women.
Yours is almost twice as large as the two I’ve had, but I don’t think it will hurt to pass it. My pain was only when a stone was moving through the ureter.
As an ER Doc who treats patients just like you on a daily basis I’d say that I usually use 5mm as my cut for off for passing spontaneously but the difference is pretty small and variable.
Also the tube leading out of the bladder is much larger than the tubes leading into it. It takes a pretty large stone to get stuck in your urethra. You probably won’t even notice it coming out.
That is some high quality boviating but let me add that here in the Deep South where kidney stones are as common as hypertension and diabetes, we see a LOT of oxalate stones from high levels of Sweet Tea!
What type of stones? The calcium ones are the most common but there are at least 3 other types. Mine are Uric Acid based IIRC and I was told stay away from the cabbage family and stay hydrated. Not the worst dietary changed.
Going by your user name: too many leafy greens? Oaxalate can cause stones to form.
In my case it was caused by nanobacteria which is why I take a daily low dose of antibiotics. I still have a sliver of stone left in a fold of my left kidney. If I cease taking the ABX the bacteria multiplies and the sliver grows. Even with the dose I pass “sand” now and then.
The original stone was a staghorn stone (filled my entire left kidney). I had multiple rounds of ESWL with a stent in place. The largest chunk to pass was the size of a pea cut in half (came from one of the folds). I also had laser surgery which broke up the pieces left behind but even with that some of the stone colony is intact.
The first one I ever had was too large to pass, I went in, they blasted it and then pulled out the pieces. Not sure if they missed any, but the pain after the fact (I never hurt before, but the blood in the urine was disconcerting to say the least), was the worst thing I have ever felt and that included wrecking my motorcycle and breaking my arm.
It felt like my kidney was in a vice.
Pain meds did help.
The second time, I knew when the pain started in my back, what was going on. I took some extra pain meds from something else and it fortunately passed that same day, it was way easier (it was also way smaller). Size is the main factor in pain. While it is moving through the small ducts, it hurts more (and I am sure if it is on the larger side of what the Doc will let pass that is not going to be fun).
My sympathies are with you.
If I never have one again, I would be a happy man.
As far as comparative pain goes, I’ve had both a kidney stone and trigeminal neuralgia (not at the same time, fortunately). The Wikipedia article on Trigeminal neuralgia describes it as “one of the most painful conditions”, and for me it was a bit worse than kidney stone pain.
Trigeminal neuralgia was a bit more troubling because it was so hard to diagnose. With the kidney stone, I developed abdominal pain in the middle of the night, and rather than wait to see a doctor in the morning I had my wife take me to the emergency section at the local hospital, where they diagnosed it quickly. The symptom of trigeminal neuralgia was pain in one tooth, and I saw a dentist and an orthodontist about it. They both did root-canal therapy on that tooth, with no change in the pain, until the orthodontist referred me to a specialist in dental pain, who dignosed it straight away from the symptoms, and referred me to a neurosurgeon.
With the kidney stone, I was initially given a stent to bypass the stone, then allowed to go on a four-week trip to Europe that was already planned, before I returned to have the operation that blasted the stone away. So the pain relief was immediate, rather than dragging on for months with the trigeminal neuralgia.
I’d get a second opinion if that sucker hasn’t passed by now. I lost my right kidney to the stones, you don’t want any more damage. At least you could have a lithotripsy, and not have to be cut open, like the old days.
My urologist said he’d had big tough guys “cry like a little girl” from the pain. He also said women had told him the pain was worse than childbirth.
Sorry to hear of your stone. They certainly can hurt. Something stuck halfway down your ureter can give you renal colic, the strong deep ache that tends to come in gradual waves. When it gets further down to the ureteral bladder junction, the pain can become more sharp and, for a male, focused on your penis like something stinging your urethra (the UBJ and the urethra are separate things approximately opposite one another with respect to the bladder, but, oddly, that’s what the pain can do). I’ve actually checked my underwear for thorns and splinters when I had a stone doing this and wasn’t sure yet what it was.
I’ve always heard the ability to pass is very reliable from around 3 or 4 mm down, and questionable from somewhere around 6 or 7 mm up, but somewhere around 5 mm it is getting hard to predict. Some stones are smooth and others jagged or rough, which of course also influences things.
I’ve had somewhere around 50 stones as big as 13 mm, and have had enough cystoscopies and lithotripsies that I have lost count, but only one lithotomy. I had a 10 day hospital stay for that one. I’ve found a big variety in how they can feel, with a few trends that depend location that I have picked up on. I mentioned two, and here are a couple more: Stones hanging out very high, in the kidney or earlier in the ureter, can cause an ache in the testicles (another pain relocation oddity). But stones passing from the bladder through the urethra to the outside have always either been unnoticeable or have tickled in an odd way, sometimes almost like scratching an itch, and never painful.
I agree with Baker that there is a downside to waiting too long in the hope of the stone passing without intervention. I think something as simple as getting X-rays again, to see if the stone has moved, could be the right level of effort.
I’ve had stones now and again. The one upside to this propensity I’ve managed to fashion is that affords me a foolproof out when confronted with less than appetizing culinary offerings. So when my mother-in-law makes a move to spoon over a portion of that overcooked under seasoned greasy lukewarm [], I say "Oh I’d love to Ma, but y’know I think [] has a lot of oxylates in it, and I really don’t wanna get another kidney stone." Works a treat!
