The Kidney Stones Kompendium

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I sadly find myself looking for first-hand details on kidney stones.

What’s better than spending Christmas Eve in the Emergency Department of the local hospital? I ask you.

Pain in lower abdomen and other issues in the past week led me to first a walk-in clinic, where I got about the level of service one expects from a Doc In The Box. ( The Nurse Practioner who saw me was dressed head to toe as an Elf. Including hat and boots. ) She told I was constipated and to buy some Benefiber and have a good holiday.

It was not to be. The following afternoon the pain had become a fascinating deep throbbing in the lower right abdominal area. I was betting the house I had a hot appendix. Off I go to the local ER. It’s called Stormont Vail Hospital and from everything I experienced it’s deserving of it’s sterling reputation.

A CT scan revealed a very small kidney stone. It was resting at the bottom of the ureter just above the bladder. They offered me Hydrocodone, which I really had no desire to ingest. I detest having narcotics in me. They offered me a non-narcotic painkiller and I took one of those and indeed it did the trick.

My heart sank upon diagnosis. My grandmother had them. As did her son ( my Dad ), her daughter, her sister, her daughter’s two sons and my brother. I was the solitary hold-out.

The stone hasn’t passed and aside from one bad couple hours the morning of the 26th I’ve not had pain. I do not disbelieve those women who have delivered babies who have compared the pain in my future to childbirth.

It may well be lurking around in my bladder, setting up a Yurt and making itself right at home. I’ve been religious about using the urine screen funnel item so I doubt it passed and was missed.

Could be a wild ride back to NYC from my current location nestled in the bosom of the Plains come Saturday. Hope it passes and isn’t a source of pain. Gotta lotta hours behind the wheel to do. Even the non-narcotic pill gave me the level of buzz I’ve always associated with going to rock concerts at The Spectrum in the late 1970’s.

No stone = no analysis = no info on which type it is. Therefore I cannot set about making massive dietary adjustments. ( Eliminatingn all triggering foods and beverages from both types of kidney stones that are most common would leave me with a balanced diet of volcanic pumice and filtered tap water to live on… )

I polled a few of the living family members. Bro has one type, Cousin #2 has another type. Therefore, despite the genetic component here, I couldn’t even ponder changes based on a familial poll of stone chemistry.

So I sit. And think about what pain is. And what varying levels of pain mean to different people. And I think about lousy family genetics.

And I wait, and wait, and wait, and wait…

Who has them and lives with them, and HOW?

2

My sympathies. I’ve had 3 kidney stone episodes starting when I was 25ish. Twice hospitalized. The first time scared the hell out of me, I had no clue what was going on and the pain was truly intense.

It has been 10 years since I passed a stone thankfully and in my case a minor diet change and a large increase in water intake has largely handled by stone problems. No meds required.

My stones are the Uric acid stone types.

The pain is extreme, like nothing else I experienced in my life.

3

I’ve had so many calcium oxalate stones I’ve lost count, 50 or so now, since 1979. My biggest was 13 mm. Little ones I’ve passed often enough I don’t make much note of them – I passed one while driving once, in a difficult area with no place to pull off the road. I’ve had many cystoscopies, several blastings, and one good old lithotomy that put me in the hospital for 10 days.

So you have a stone at the UBJ (the ureteral-bladder junction). I find when they are at this point there is often a sharp stinging pain similar to a bladder infection. But there’s such a wide variety of pains, varying from event to event, and also varying with the location.

One piece of advice is that if it’s a 3 mm stone or less you will pass it with no problem, if it’s in the 4 to 6 mm range you could need help, and if it’s much above 7 you’re going to need help. Another piece of advice is to check out medicines that help, such as Polycitra or Theralith (of course the choice of med will depend on the stone type, but the calcium oxalate stones that these meds help with are quite common).

4

I’ve had two calcium oxalate stones. Both occurred in my 60s about 3 years apart. I am now 69 and haven’t had a problem for about 5 years. They were both 3 mm and I passed them successfully.

In both cases I went to the emergency room and was given narcotics for the pain. Also in both cases I was given prescriptions for hyrdocodone/acetaminophen but didn’t need them for long. I passed the first stone about 15 hours after first feeling symptoms (in fact two hours after leaving the ER, the CT scan showed it about to enter my bladder), the second took about 24 hours. (I was given one of those screened funnels to pee into.)

Both stones were from my right kidney but the pain and symptoms were a bit different. The first one was lower abdomen and groin ache (I’m male) and came and went during the day. When the pain became steady and sharp, and I vomited (something I hadn’t done in 40 years) I went to the ER.

The second time was rather bizarre as it was so sudden. I woke up fine on a Sunday morning and while lying in bed listening to the radio, I suddenly had pain in my right side and it got so bad I was convinced it was my appendix. It went away as suddenly as it appeared and I attempted to go on with my day. Later, the pain came back but more a general abdominal ache with occasional sharp pains in my back. A scan at the ER confirmed another stone.

My urologist told me to drink more water and drink lemonade every day. My research shows that it doesn’t have to be lemonade. Juice, lemon-lime sodas, crystal lite, pretty much anything that has citrate or citric acid has worked for me, at least so far. Scans from both incidents showed tiny stones in both kidneys (mostly in my right) but so far (knock on wood) I’ve had no further problems.

5

I thought of this after the edit window closed.

I eat a LOT of popcorn and I used to salt it rather liberally. I have cut way down on that since the second stone and maybe that is helping me also. Can’t say for sure, but it can’t hurt certainly.

6

I’ve had four stones; like @What_Exit, I had mine from my late 20s to my mid 30s. Thankfully, all of them passed without getting completely stuck, and requiring a procedure to break them up. Increasing my water intake seems to have done the trick, as I haven’t had one in 20 years now – I didn’t make any other major dietary changes.

I agree that it was the most excruciating pain I have ever experienced. When I was experiencing my first one, the doctor (a woman) who saw me in the ER said, “you’re experiencing a level of pain which is similar to childbirth.”

The urologist who treated me for my final stone explained that there are two particularly “tight spots in the road,” where kidney stones are most likely to cause pain when they pass: one is exiting the kidney, and the other is when it enters the bladder (which it sounds like is where yours is now).

Also, an anecdote to share with you, from my experience with kidney stone #3, to help you feel that “it could be worse.” I’m going to put part of it in spoilers, as it is a little NSFW, and maybe a little too painful for the squeamish.

Kidney stone #3 hit me at about 1 a.m. on a weeknight, and I drove myself to the nearby ER, while in intense pain. When I was admitted to the ER, I was the only patient there; the doctor sent me to radiology so that they could figure out exactly where it was.

An hour or two later, they sent me back to the ER; it was now around 3 a.m., and there was another patient in the ER – a young man. He was behind a curtain, so I couldn’t see him, but I could hear the conversation that the doctor was having with him:

He had been having sex, when his foreskin suddenly tore. The doctor was stitching his foreskin back onto his penis, and asking him how exactly he had managed to do such a thing. He was clearly very upset.

After listening to that, I thought to myself, “y’know, a kidney stone isn’t that bad, by comparison.”

7

Never had one, but treated many. It’s a very severe pain. Mixing different classes of pain medicine may help a little. But how painful stones are depends on the size, location and number. If it’s blocking flow, it will be much more painful than if it is sitting quietly in the kidney. Bigger than 5-6mm you’re often looking at surgical solutions.

General advice is to drink lots more fluid, don’t take additional calcium in the form of supplements, don’t avoid calcium containing foods but lower consumption if high, consider drinking less tea, getting an ultrasound too may be useful - if you get lots try to get ultrasounds when possible rather than many CTs.

8

Don’t sit. The more you sit around, the more pain you’ll end up in. One of mine took several days to pass, I found I was in the least pain when I was up and moving. IIRC, it finally passed when I was mowing the lawn (and stopped for a bathroom break).

9

My sympathies go out to the OP. I myself fought the stones, and the stones won, taking my right kidney with them.

I recall a previous stone thread, don’t recal from when, in which we described our levels of pain. My urologist said he’d had tough guys criy, and women who said it was worse than labor. I don’t remember the poster, but she said her sister could top that. She had a stone start passing while in labor!

If the stone isn’t passing, has your doctor advised a lithotripsy?

10

I’m certainly no tough guy, but, yeah, it was fucking awful. About half way to the hospital it dawned on me (this was before I knew what it was) that I really shouldn’t have driven myself there. I was so distracted by the pain there was no way I was paying attention the road.

I was telling someone else about it and she mentioned that when her husband had them, she drove him to the hospital, pulled up to the ER with the intention of getting him inside and then moving the car. When the nurses saw him crawling in, they “diagnosed” him with kidney stones, telling the wife that kidney stones are really the only time they see grown men down on all fours like that.

11

Well, I wasn’t going to go on about my gross medical experiences this year, but since the topic has arisen. :slight_smile:

Early February, I get a huge, puking-level pain in lower right abdomen early in the morning. Wife takes me into urgent care as soon as they open, and urgent care tells us to go to the hospital, suspecting appendicitis. Get a CT scan, and there is a 7mm by 4mm stone sitting in my right ureter blocking it just shy of the bladder, and my right kidney is swollen up like a balloon. And then at 10am-ish, the pain just 100% stops. Docs gave me a prescription for Flowmax and painkillers and tell me to expect some fun in the next few days while it passes, but nothing happens.

Then in mid-October, same thing again – puking levels of pain in the same region. Back to the ER for a new CT scan, and it’s the same fucking stone in the same fucking spot. Apparently this stone’s modus operandi is to just hang out where it is, staying to the side most of the time, but periodically blocking off the tube to cause problems. And just like last time, the pain stopped by late morning as the stone decided to pull over again and let traffic get by.

So at that point we figured out this is just going to happen periodically until the problem is dealt with, so a week later I had a urologist get to ninth base with me with a laser to get that thing properly zapped and a stent put in to keep the ureter open while it healed. Several days of peeing blood, then the stent removal, which was basically one very sudden tug on a string, and that was that.

Still have a bit of pain in the area sometimes, but not the full on renal colic of the previous episodes.

12

I’m surprised they waited that long. I thought (and could be totally wrong) that either 4mm or 5mm is the limit before they go in and get it instead of waiting to see if you pass it. But then, I suppose it only needs to be less than the 4/5mm length in one direction.

After my first one, instead of getting an ER bill and being told to wait it out at home, I just went to the doctor, had a UA to verify and a scan to check the size/location and went home with some painkillers. No reason to spend thousands in the hospital when i can spend hundreds at the doc’s office.

13

During my second kidney stone attack, I walked into the ER, looking very unhappy. I already knew what it was, between the extreme pain and the pink pee, so when the admitting nurse asked me what was wrong, and I gasped, “kidney stone,” she yelled to an orderly, “Get me a wheelchair! We got a guy giving birth!” :smiley:

14

Correctamundo. I was speaking mostly metaphorically, although I have to admit that visiting the MIL does involve sitting for hours a day visiting, watching football/ t.v., surfing the web, etc.

During that first bad bout pre-ER visit, walking about a mile gave me a tiny bit of relief. It’s been freezing rain on and off the last 2 days but today I do look forward to a good walk.

15

The fact that the pain went away completely within a few hours made it hard to justify surgery. I had an ultrasound at the urologist’s office a week or two later and he couldn’t find anything in the bladder, and kidney was healthy, and 5% of cases that just spontaneously resolve so maybe it was one of those. We were aware that the in-office ultrasound couldn’t really image the ureter well, so we couldn’t see the stone if it was still in that exact spot, but it wasn’t causing any problems at that point.

At the second ER visit, the ER docs were willing to do the surgery right at that moment, but I elected to get it done a week later on a non-emergency basis, since by the time the decision was to be made the episode was over.

I think the whole, “stone gets out of the way so the symptoms resolve, but doesn’t actually pass so turns up again later” screwed up the diagnosis a fair bit. The usual course is the pain doesn’t stop until the little fucker is gone one way or another, and clearly that is what the docs were expecting to happen.

16

I’ve had 3 kidney stones. The first was about 25 years ago, a few days before I was to leave for Japan on a long business trip. I had that removed with lithotripsy. The second was several weeks later while I was in Japan. Not fun, I ended up in three different hospitals while there. They finally gave me some meds “to help dissolve the stone” and a Voltaren suppository (!) for pain and told me to go home. My part in the project was over so that’s what I did. That stone hung around in my urethra for several weeks until I had it removed. The third was a few weeks ago at the beginning of November, which necessitated a trip to the ER. Just had it removed a week and a half ago. 0/10 would not recommend.

17

When I had my first one, they did the UA and a few minutes later a nurse walked into the room and put something in my IV. When I asked what it was she said “morphine, you have a kidney stone”.

I know, I just wanted to make the point and that seemed like a good way to do it. I assume the (slight) pain relief when moving is due to the cramps, not that something with the stone is physically happening because you’re moving around. Just like if you pull a muscle in your leg, you quickly learn that if you spend 2 hours watching TV it’ll be in a lot more pain than if you’re moving around.

18

I’ve had 5 kidney stone attacks. The first was in my mid-twenties. I had gone to work feeling fine, but started feeling unwell after about an hour, and my boss walked by my desk, stopped to look at me, and said I was going to the hospital right now! They quickly diagnosed a kidney stone and I was there overnight, went home the next day, passed out in mid-conversation on the phone with my mother, thus learning I had a UTI, and soon after, learning I was allergic to Sulfa drugs.

I had another a year later on the other side, then 3 more spaced out over the next 4 decades, with the most recent a couple of years ago in my mid-sixties. All the pain has been as the stone moved down the ureter. Once in the bladder, they have eventually passed without my noticing.

My experience, at least after the first one, is that the pain came in separate bouts of 15 to 20 minutes, then subsided for an hour or three. I agree with the advice above - moving around has helped reduce the pain in my case.

19

And if the OP (and everyone else, I assume) is anything like me, you’ll spend the rest of your life getting all worked up every you feel the slightest twinge of pain in your lower back or sides.

20

In the hospital, kidney stone pain can often be diagnosed by a characteristic movement caused by the pain. It is difficult to fake, but I’ve seen opiate seekers try to do it.