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[BigV]

Everything you *ever* want to know about Kidney Stones.

If you can't pass it with your urine, you have a couple of choices. Open kidney surgery (I don't know what the actual term is, but I've seen pictures of hunks of kidney like you might find in the meat section with a handful of bloody gravel in one of the pockets--not recommended); lapro-urethreal-??? surgery where they stick the camera and the tiny rock crusher on the end of a flexible metal wand right you know where (pass the general anesthesia please and make that morphine on the rocks a double); extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy (actually not making up any part of this one) where they put you in a water bath and then assault the side if the steel bathtub with a sonic hammer/gun that sends shock waves through the wall of the bath, through the water, through your tissue, and through your kidney so violently that the stone shatters and you can (hopefully) pass the fragments. No, not making it up, you can look it up.

The pain associated with a kidney stone has a special name: renal colic. Several sites describe the pain as excruciating, as painful as giving birth. I can't make that comparison of course, but I can testify that it is the most painful experience I've ever had. From Wikipedia:

The pain typically begins in the abdomen and often radiates to the hypochondrium or the groin. The pain is often colicky (comes in waves) due to ureteric peristalsis, but may be constant. It may come in two varieties: dull and acute; the acute variation is particularly unpleasant and is often described as one of the strongest pain sensations felt by humans (being worse than childbirth, broken bones, gunshot wounds, burns, or surgery).[1]

The kind of stone I show here is (probably) calcium oxalate dihydrate, a common one, also known as Weddellite. There are numerous pictures around and they're all unpleasant, especially the microscopic ones that look like a jumbled sharp crystal burr. The stone pictured above is about the size of a BB. I know that doesn't seem very big, but I promise you, it punches way, way above its weight.

As for how do you get them or better yet, how do you avoid them? The solution to pollution is dilution. Drink lots of water. You should be producing two liters of urine a day. I'm a bigger guy, so I should be making more than that minimum. As the amount of urine decreases, it becomes concentrated and the solution becomes more saturated. This makes the minerals more likely to precipitated out of solution onto a given crystal seed like a clump of protein or whatever. Now you've started one, the only way (except for uric acid stones which are amenable to chemical dissolving) to get rid of it is to get rid of it. You can't rinse/wash/dilute away such crystals once they've come out of solution. They're small to begin with but will only inexorably grow, eventually to the point (ouch) where they are a problem.

There are foods to minimize and such, but the main best easiest idea is to drink plenty of water.