Kidney stones are not fun! If you’ve ever had the experience of passing a kidney stone, you know what I mean. Those babies are painful. I had one last month in my left kidney. At first it feels a lot like lower-back pain. However, it gets sharper and starts to feel like someone put a knife into your side. That initial pain is when the stone gets lodged in the ureter that’s attached to your kidney. If you’re lucky, it eventually makes its way through your system and you just pee it out. If not, you have to go to the hospital and have them try a few different methods like sonically blasting it, or as a last resort, surgically removing it. I had another one about 12 years ago and the pain got so bad that I had to go to the hospital. At first, they tried giving me vicodin, but that didn’t help at all. Finally, they gave me morphine and that killed the pain. They had me stay overnight and I finally passed it.
The picture below is my stone from last month.
The stone is like a tiny little object with razor-sharp points on it. When the stone is moving through your ureter and urinary tract, the pain can be excruciating. It can make little cuts in the interior walls along the way and that shows up as blood in your urine. I talked with a nurse who had them once and she said that kidney stone pain was worse than delivering her baby. I don’t know about delivering a baby, but I can tell you that kidney stone pain is the worst pain I’ve experienced so far.
