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Passing a Kidney Stone Part 2/2
He has a very common description of how people wake up and tell us how they pass the kidney stone. It’s not unusual to wake up in the early mornings or even late evenings and have excruciating pain. If you haven’t any kidney stone before the worst pain in your life is really a fair assessment of how you would describe the kidney stone.
Pat described that it’s passing triplets and when I had women that have delivered babies either C-section or even spontaneous deliveries they would tell you that the kidney stone is much, much more painful than even having a child.
The common treatments for kidney stones that are available are actually too full. One is extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy. It’s a big messy worth of blast in the kidney stone. The patient lies down on a bed and used sound waves and x-ray to focus sound waves on the kidney stone. That is actually the most minimally invasive treatment option and it’s successful in about 65 to 70% of cases.
Option number two is a scope therapy and the scopes can be place through the bladder or through the back. Now by placing these scopes we can actually visualize the kidney stone and through these little, tiny fiber optic scopes we can actually use other forms of lithotripsy including lasers and hydraulic therapy and pneumatic therapy which essentially we break the stone under direct vision.
There is a family history involved. A lot of the patients we end up seeing will have a significant first degree relative type of kidney stones. Therefore, if you have a significant family history then you are at risk down the road and should take preventative measures. This is as simple as just to increasing your fluids and watching your diet. In talking to my average patient they always tell me that they just don’t have time to drink fluids. They can’t find the time. They don’t have the time at work. Their lives are so busy.
I always try to discuss with them how long their commutes are in the morning and the afternoon. If you talked to most patients in especially around here there are in the car for quite a bit of time so we always talked taking bottles of water and in just a simple commute in the morning and the afternoon they could probably double their fluid consumption.
Passed kidney stones that you see is actually very common and routine. Most kidney stones are in the size or magnitude of just 7 millimeters. In fact it’s the smallest stones that are causing more of a problem than the bigger ones. The small ones tend to move quicker. They tend to block off a little too. The kidney stones can come in all shapes and sizes. This is a stone I removed from a patient who actually had a dead infected kidney and the stone was removed. This is what is called the stag horn kidney stone. As you can see it’s got branches and looks like little deer stag.
Stones can get up very large. In fact this is the probably the largest stone I've ever removed and this was in the patient who didn’t even know yet he had a kidney stone and really didn’t have any pain and just had been worked up with blood in his urine. If you have a family history of kidney stones, if you're on any diets and you start having pain please think of the kidney stones as the potential option and be seen by your doctor as soon as you can.
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