Last winter I had a few weeks of stomach cramping that I chalked up to an irregular menstrual cycle. When I woke up one morning with intense aching and throbbing in my groin and back, I thought this must be one raging Aunt Flo and the blood in the toilet seemed to confirm it. But as the pain became unbearable, I knew something was really wrong.
Within hours, I was on all fours in a hospital emergency room, bellowing like an injured animal, fighting what felt like contractions not that different from those I?d experienced with the unmedicated childbirths of my two young daughters. Only this was actually worse, with the added vomiting and terrifying uncertainty about what was happening to me. After blood tests and an ultrasound, the doctor finally figured out what was causing the extreme pain: a kidney stone. Three rounds of morphine later, I was sent home with a prescription for Percocets to take until the stone could be removed, and the lingering question of why, at 39 and in perfect health, I had developed a kidney stone. Kidney stones are small, jagged masses of salts and minerals that form inside the kidneys and may travel down the urinary tract where they cause severe pain in the lower abdomen, groin or back, and sometimes lead to nausea and blood in the urine. They can range in size from a tiny speck to a golf ball. My ultrasound showed that mine was six millimetres and stuck in the ureter tube that goes from the kidney to the bladder. I learned that stones larger than...