Once you have drugs, passing the stone is quick and painless.
Without drugs, passing the stone is an exercise in extreme pain (like, say, when you’re stuck in a hotel in a foreign country by yourself and there’s no phone in the room and you can’t get to the door and scream for help…)
However, both Gordon and Schmidt missed the key thing with stones. Don’t puke until you’re in the ER. If you puke in the ER waiting area, that’s your smart pass to see a doc right away, which means happy time drugs.
No idea, but my kidney stone was the single most painful thing I’ve ever experienced, and I once melted the skin off my thumb knuckle with boiling coffee. It is absolutely incapacitating.
My sympathies. Friends who have suffered with that have seemed miserable. The closest I came was 10 or 12 years ago with what the doctor called silt (IIRC). No pain or even any discomfort. One day I went to relieve the bladder and some rapid-fire, solid deposits came out along with the usual business. You no what, it scared the piss out of me…it SCARED the PISS out of ME. Get it.
Seriously, it was just weird. Wasn’t expecting it and the handful or so settled down to the bottom of the bowl and it has never happened again. Weird.
I’ve had one kidney stone in my life, and it happened 6 days after I had major abdominal surgery. I was already uncomfortable as hell from the incisions (4 of em) and the extreme pain from the kidney stones turned that into a day of complete hell. I went to the ER and they didn’t even bother having me wait, just took me straight back to a room and hooked me up to some WONDERFUL pain killers.
I’m in the worst pain EVAR group also. the last one, being all ninja, I figured I could mediate through the pain…yeah, that worked for about two hours, and morphine helped the rest of the way.
my experience is if you walk into an ER and say kidney stone, they take you right away, cuz you are going to kill someone, or throw up in very short order.
My torsion was easily the single most painful 3 hours of my whole life. Even after they got me doped up on dilauded, I was still at least a 6 or 7 on the pain scale.
Most of my daily allotment of fluids come in the form of coffee. I also live in an area where the water is chock full o hardness. Those pictures scare the hell out of me. I checked this thread a few days ago when it started and serously this has been on my mind since.
My condolences to anyone to whom this has happened.
I had one in 2003. It felt like there was something inside me moving around at first, and I went from intense discomfort to excruciating pain to even more excruciating pain to the wonderful embrace of sweet, sweet morphine.
It SUCKED. I now drink a lot of water and cranberry juice, and no longer drink a ton of soda a day.
As far as I can tell, I’ve been ok since Sunday. Saturday night was the ER visit, Sunday was the second round of pain but I was prepared with prescription drugs then, so I took care of that before it got as bad as Saturday. Later Saturday and then on Monday I got the stinging as I peed, but it was never terribly painful, just enough to let me know this pee was special.
So I’m thinking the stone I had probably mostly broke up when it finally hit my bladder after the second round on Sunday, and then made its way out in little bits. My followup appointment with a urologist is tomorrow morning. Thanks for the sympathies, and my condolences to everyone else in the thread with similar experiences. I’ve been looking for the willpower to kick soda out of my diet anyway, so this should help.
I don’t actually know if it’s true, but I’m going to try to ignore any skepticism so I can use it as my motivation to kick soda for general healthiness. I know caffeine can aggravate existing kidney stones, but I don’t what effect soda (or caffeine, or sugar, or Yellow 5, or whatever) has on getting them in the first place.
So if you find out soda’s just fine, don’t tell me!
1:30 am when the pain hit me, and I tried to soldier through it for an hour before waking up my wife and having her take me to the ER. Gods, but morphine is wonderful.
