Surviving a Kidney Stone

One day in 2001 I woke with a huge pain in my back. It was so severe as to be debilitating. I made a trip to the ER at our local hospital where it was diagnosed as a kidney stone. By that time the pain was subsiding, but they gave me a prescription for a strong pain killer. As I left, the ER nurse said, “We’ll probably be seeing you again.” How true that turned out to be.

That had been a Saturday evening. The next day was pretty normal – went to church, etc. But on Monday evening it came back with a vengeance. The prescription said no more than one pill every six hours. I took one, but after only two hours it was no longer effective. I was literally rolling on the floor of the bathroom, writhing in pain like I’d never felt before. My wife had never seen me in pain like that either, but there was nothing she could do for me. Childbirth is supposed to be the ultimate pain for women, but I’ve since talked to women who said that pain from a kidney stone is even worse. I can believe it. So, back to the ER it was!

They ask you to evaluate your pain on a scale of 1-10 in the ER. My response was, “I suppose there could be something worse, but this is on the plus side of 9.” They began giving me injections of morphine – one, then another, then a third. By then they were up to 9 cc’s and the pain finally went away. The nurse said, “Usually the number you give on the 1-10 scale is about the number of cc’s that it takes. They were right on with this one. Since it was late evening by this point, they admitted me, kept me on a high dose of pain killers for the night and scheduled the procedure for early the following morning.

A CT scan and x-ray confirmed that this was a uric acid stone, not the more common calcium stone (calcium stones show up on an x-ray, but uric acid stones do not – the technical term is that they are radiolucent). It was about the size of a pencil eraser and was lodged in the opening out of the kidney – definitely too large to pass. The treatment was to insert a stent into the ureter between the kidney and the bladder that had a curl (like a pig’s tail) on the upper end (they put it in straight and it curls when they release it). This kept the stone from blocking the opening. This surgery is done under anesthesia. The doctor said that when they put it in there was a large amount of infection (pus) behind it and the pressure that was building in the kidney from not being able to drain was contributing to the pain. He put me on a regimen of a liquid that was added to glasses of water (tasted like mild lemon juice). This liquid turned my urine alkaline so that it would help to dissolve the stone over the next 10 days.

I had an appointment at the end of the 10 days to remove the stent. While this is also done under anesthesia, it is an outpatient procedure. One interesting side-note is that when I walked into the OR, the OR nurse turned out to be someone whom I knew. I was initially a little concerned as the procedure involves your “privates,” but realized that she would just be doing her job, so I put aside any modesty. The stone by this time had shrunk to less than half its original size. The doctor tried to grab it with a small pair of alligator clips (again inserted into the penis and up the urethra then up the ureter), but it had been made very brittle by the alkaline urine and so it just broke apart into small bits that were easily passed.

I now take a daily allopurinol pill that keeps my urine less acidic so I won’t get another one. This is the same treatment as is used for gout – which happens when the same type of uric acid crystallizes in your lower extremity joints (knees, ankles) and causes pain. But nothing like the pain of that kidney stone. I NEVER want to have to go through that again, so that pill is one that I never neglect to take!

In an earlier blog I wrote about my heart attack (http://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2017/02/surviving-heart-attack.html). So it’s only appropriate that I also write about this other major medical issue in my life. This one is adapted from my autobiography (My Life – available on amazon.com – see https://www.amazon.com/My-Life-Story-Alan-Russell/dp/1503181065/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1490565695&sr=8-1&keywords=alan+russell+my+life). But since relatively few copies of that have ever been purchased, I thought I’d post it again on my blog.