Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain Stuff. Lauren vogebon here. Mark Bird of Miami, Florida was thirty eight years old when he had his first kidney stones. The pain started in his back, like he had slipped a disk. Bird was used to back pain, so he tried his standard routine of stretching, yoga, and
frequent trips to the chiropractor, but nothing helped. Then one day, he was sitting in his office chair when it felt like someone had sneaked up behind him and stabbed him in the back of the bowie knife for the article. This episode is based on hows to work? Spoke Bird when he was forty eight and the veteran of two excruciating kidney stone episodes. He said, the pain takes your breath away. You're doubled over and thinking I need to
get to the hospital right now. Every year, half a million people visit emergency rooms in the United States with kidney's tones, and around one in ten Americans will have a kidney stone at some point in their life. We humans typically have two kidneys, and their main job is to filter waste products out of our blood. Normally, those waste products are flushed out of the kidney as urine.
Your kidneys filter some fifty gallons that's nine liters of blood every twenty four hours and eliminate some sixty four ounces or two leads of waste. In some cases, however, there are excess waste products in the blood that aren't flushed out of the kidneys. Those leftover waste products can form tiny crystals that bunched together over time to form increasingly large stones. Calcium oxalate is the most common component of kidney stones, but there are others too, including uric acid, struvite,
and sistine. The real trouble starts when one of these stones leaves the kidney and enters the uritor, which is a narrow tube that transports urine from the kidney to the ladder. That's when it can feel like you've been stabbed in the back. Pain is a hard thing to quantify, but the discomfort of passing a kidney stone is routinely compared to childbirth or worse. But the source of that
pain may be surprising. How stuff works. Also spoke with Dr Timothy Average, a kidney stone specialist at Prisma Health Urology in Columbia, South Carolina. He said, the common belief is that the stone itself causes the pain. Patients will frequently say it must have a lot of rough edges or spikes because this one hurts a lot, or it's really large and that's what hurts so badly. That actually has nothing to do with the pain. So if it's not the stone, what the heck is causing that searing pain.
The thing is that if a kidney stone is large enough, it'll get stuck in the narrow passageway of the uritor, causing urine to build up behind it. With nowhere to go, the urine exerts increasing pressure on the narrow eutor and on the kidney, causing the tissues to stretch like balloons. Average explained that stretching is what triggers the pain people feel when they have kidney stones. You feel it in your back first, and then it can radiate around the
front and down to the groin. It's pretty excruciating for most and the body has all types of nerves for sensing things like touch and temperature. The nerves and your kidney in eutor detect distension or dilation, just like your intestines, bladder, and bowels. An obstructed bowel is also very painful, but kidney stones are far more common. The discomfort of kidney stones is described as colic since it comes in waves.
That's because the orator uses involuntary wave like muscle movements called peristalsis to move urine from the kidney to the bladder in packets or bunches. If the pathway is blocked, the pressure builds with every involuntary squeeze of the urotor, and so does the pain. In both women and men. Urine exits the bladder through the urethra and then out
from the body. Another common misconceptions as average is that the most painful part of having a kidney stone is passing it through the urethra, but he says those fears are largely unfounded. He said the urethra and men and women is much wider than the eurotor, almost twice the size. Patients will frequently say to me, oh, I'll know one, I pay it out. Often they actually don't. Bird, for
his part, disagrees. Even though treatment for his kidney stones involved internally blasting them with shock waves to break them into smaller particles, the largest fragments were still the size of bebes. A bird says it felt like urinating and I quote shards of glass. One of the many unpleasant surprises of Bird's ordeal was that he had to have a stent in aserted into his eudor to open the passageway from the kidney to the bladder, and the stent
stayed in for two long weeks. Ural stents are ten fifteen inch plastic tubes that's around that are inserted through the urethra all the way up to the kidney to let urine flow to the bladder again. A stent is used in many kidney stone removals to keep the order from becoming obstructed again by swelling. After the operation is complete, Insertion of the stent is done under heavy sedation. But removal isn't, a bird said, the nurses try to use the element of surprise. They pull it out like a
rip chord. Today's episode is based on the article kidney stones are excruciating, but the source of pain is surprising on how stuff works dot Com, written by Dave Bruise. A brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff works dot Com and it's produced by Tyler Klang. Before more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, up Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H