Hopefully none of you will ever need to know this, but I'm going to share my recent experience anyway.
Leaving a mid-day birthday party for my wife early in the evening a couple of weeks ago. I returned home feeling a little unwell. There was no pain but I felt tired and had a bit of an upset stomach. I laid down and took something to help me fall asleep. I awoke at around midnight with excruciating pain in my lower left abdomen. Not knowing what was happening, I started imagining all sorts of things. Such as, because I've had some issues with diverticulitis, a ruptured bowel. Or appendicitis. I was able, barely, to start up my computer to see if I could find out some information and discovered that it was not in the area for appendicitis. That was little comfort at the moment because I was pretty sure that I was dying.
My wife convinced me to go to the emergency room the next morning where a cat scan revealed a very tiny stone lodged in my ureter. Needless to say, this was a relief. The pain, which came in waves, was no less intense. But knowing what was causing it was comforting.
After a dose of morphine, some prescriptions and some advice to drink a lot of water, I was sent home. I filled the prescriptions for the pain medication, which turned out to be simply Ibuprofen, and the one for relaxing the prostate. But I didn't fill the one for antibiotics because I was told that I had no infection. But I did start drinking cranberry juice to avoid getting an infection.
That night was the worst. Again, around midnight the pain came on. It was the worst pain that I can remember ever experiencing. But again, knowing what was causing it made it much easier to deal with.
The stone passed a day later. Ironically, the stone was kidney shaped.
When the stone passed, I only noticed because I was told to try to save the stone for ID and was peeing into a big plastic cup. There was no pain during that last part.
I don't know if it's different for men and women. But one of the questions I asked and received no answer for was this; Do the tubes get bigger as they get nearer the exit? Is the pain worse as the stone travels between the kidney and the bladder or between the bladder and the exit? No one could tell me.
My experience is that indeed the pain is much worse as the stone travels down the ureter to the bladder. I have no idea if others have had the same experience.
I have since been to see a urologist and the stone is being analyzed to determine what it consists of. Evidently, there are numerous minerals which can form stones . Knowing this information may help me to figure out what caused the stone to form and what steps or changes I can make to prevent a recurrence. However, I believe that I already know what I did to cause this to happen. I simply did not drink enough water. For years, I have started my day with black coffee. A lot of it. And unless it was very hot and I was sweating a lot. I would just go from coffee to my evening beer without much else in between. Also, because of my age and the fact that I was getting up more often in the night to pee than I liked. I didn't drink much water in the evenings before bed. So I'm pretty sure that even though I've made some dietary changes in my life recently, the real or main cause of the stones was simply not drinking enough water. I'll know more when I see the Doc next month.
I read somewhere that one in eleven people will develop kidney stones and that once you have, the chances of developing more increases.
This post may not help anyone. But then again, perhaps it might. I wish I had been a little better informed about kidney stones before I experienced them first-hand.
At any rate. Drink water. Lots of it. You really don't ever want to get a kidney stone. But if you do, drink even more water. And don't worry, you aren't dying. You will just feel like you are.