4 ms·

One of the most painful things I’ve ever experienced. I let myself get way too dehydrated while exercising on a very hot summer day, which brought it about (tho

One of the most painful things I’ve ever experienced. I let myself get way too dehydrated while exercising on a very hot summer day, which brought it about (though I was obviously susceptible to them). I started hydrating a lot more and taking potassium supplements and luckily haven’t had them since. Thankfully I went to a great hospital, and the staff there knew how painful the condition is, so there was only around 15 minutes between when I arrived at the ER and when I had an IV of morphine in my arm.

sgtnoodle 4y ago
Do you to think crystals can form that quickly to have been caused by a single day of dehydration? I had one a couple years ago. My theory is that I had accumulated crystalization the year prior. I had a heart nerve issue and my heart rate was significantly reduced for several months, getting as bad as 30 bpm for a couple weeks. Normally it's about 80 bpm. My kidneys were definitely underperforming as indicated by blood labs performed when I ended up in the ED/ICU with "total heart block". With that problem resolved, my kidneys were happy again and the crystals presumably started to gradually dissolve. My urologist dismissed my theory completely, but I've been generally disappointed by my experience working with them and I am on the verge of finding a new provider. My most recent ultrasound shows that the kidney that had the stone pass is totally clear, while the other kidney still has some crystalization.
- eigenvalue 4y ago
  I actually don’t know much about it from a medical standpoint. But just from a pure Bayesian reasoning it seems overwhelmingly likely to me that it was the precipitating cause, since I never had it before that. I do think most doctors are very weak at identifying or even understanding patterns that are very unusual and which they haven’t seen before or read about. They generally don’t rely on first principles thinking but reason through pattern matching and referencing their training and experience.
  - bmurphy1976 4y ago
    They take time to build up. You probably knocked it loose during your exercise regimen and it got stuck in a new much worse place. I get them regularly and I swear there are times where I feel a tightness that I attribute to one getting built up. Then one day the pain comes.
    - sgtnoodle 4y ago
      The one stone I passed took about a month and a half, and I suspect it dissolved because I never saw it. It turns out I have an anatomical variation on that kidney where I have two ureters. The double ureter meant that my kidney had a redundant path to my bladder, and so there was less pressure on the stone to migrate. It hurt really bad when it first developed because I was tensing up from worry, but once it was diagnosed I was able to mostly manage the pain just by relaxing.

sgtnoodle 4y ago

Do you to think crystals can form that quickly to have been caused by a single day of dehydration? I had one a couple years ago. My theory is that I had accumulated crystalization the year prior. I had a heart nerve issue and my heart rate was significantly reduced for several months, getting as bad as 30 bpm for a couple weeks. Normally it's about 80 bpm. My kidneys were definitely underperforming as indicated by blood labs performed when I ended up in the ED/ICU with "total heart block". With that problem resolved, my kidneys were happy again and the crystals presumably started to gradually dissolve. My urologist dismissed my theory completely, but I've been generally disappointed by my experience working with them and I am on the verge of finding a new provider. My most recent ultrasound shows that the kidney that had the stone pass is totally clear, while the other kidney still has some crystalization.

eigenvalue 4y ago
I actually don’t know much about it from a medical standpoint. But just from a pure Bayesian reasoning it seems overwhelmingly likely to me that it was the precipitating cause, since I never had it before that. I do think most doctors are very weak at identifying or even understanding patterns that are very unusual and which they haven’t seen before or read about. They generally don’t rely on first principles thinking but reason through pattern matching and referencing their training and experience.
- bmurphy1976 4y ago
  They take time to build up. You probably knocked it loose during your exercise regimen and it got stuck in a new much worse place. I get them regularly and I swear there are times where I feel a tightness that I attribute to one getting built up. Then one day the pain comes.
  - sgtnoodle 4y ago
    The one stone I passed took about a month and a half, and I suspect it dissolved because I never saw it. It turns out I have an anatomical variation on that kidney where I have two ureters. The double ureter meant that my kidney had a redundant path to my bladder, and so there was less pressure on the stone to migrate. It hurt really bad when it first developed because I was tensing up from worry, but once it was diagnosed I was able to mostly manage the pain just by relaxing.