I had my first kidney stone on Wednesday. It was as bad as they say it is. It's so bad that the standard discharge prescriptions include a little hydrocodone for pain and fifteen tabs of a super-powerful anti-nausea agent so you can still get it down if the pain is so bad you can't stop puking. And it is that bad. Women who have undergone both say that it is comparable to childbirth. (My grandmother said kidney stones were worse, but she'd had a bunch of short, easy labors. Your mileage may vary.)
I'm fine now, but bereft of any fantasies I might have entertained about enduring torture. The actual disillusionment went something like this:
Nurse: How would you describe your pain on a scale of one to ten?
Me: Do it to Julia! Do it to Juuuuuuulia!
The offending stone, which was less than 2mm, ended up washing out painlessly with an alpha blocker and like two gallons of Gatorade. The practical lesson here is that the episode might have been much less intense or even not noticed if I wasn't habitually dehydrated. So yeah, more water.
But it's the evolutionary question that baffles me. That little ragged stone was triggering all that pain by traveling down the ureter, which connects the kidney to the bladder. Unlike the urethra, which carries both urine and semen, it's not involved in sexual stimulation. Things can go wrong with it: you are in real danger if a stone damages the ureter wall enough to cause an infection. So that's a good thing to know, but somehow, I don't see the Australopithecines with hyper-sensitive ureters out-breeding the ones with insensitive ureters because they had an inner warning signal that they needed to see a urologist and get an antibiotics prescription.
So that's the news from Ureter Woebegone. Kidney stones suck and you should drink lots of water. And wear glasses if you need 'em.
