22mm stone ended in ureter reconstruction surgery

Buckle up because this is a long one sorry guys 😅

In September last year I (27F) experienced the most horrifying pain on my right flank and lower back area. I had never had a kidney stone before and at the time I was 6 months postpartum so I had no idea what the pain was and chalked it up to my body just having a moment or getting my cycle back. I slept for hours and eventually woke up feeling normal again. Fast forward to end of November, the pain came back tenfold and this time the right side of my abdomen was hard so I decided to go to the ER. They did an ultrasound, blood & urine tests and came back saying I had a 8mm stone stuck in my ureter and that I needed to stay the night as I also had a fever and chills. They put me on antibiotics and after 2 nights at the hospital they discharged me and referred me to a urologist. Saw the urologist, did a CT and turns out my 8mm was actually a 22mm and was completely blocking my ureter (love that for me 😩).

Urologist opted to do a ureteroscopy with laser lithotripsy and put a stent in but I woke up after the procedure and he said he couldn’t get the scope up as my ureter had so many kinks in it - which was another issue as he told me my ureter was so badly damaged from the stone being there for what he believed was over 1.5 years -, the stent was there but wasn’t placed right so the pain was excruciating. He ended up telling me he needed to remove the stone by doing the old school surgery where he would go through the kidney and into my ureter and give me a nephrostomy bag to use for 4 weeks. I said no thanks and ended up going to a hospital that specialized in robotic surgery.

Finally in January, after months of living in pain, and doing what felt like a one hundred CT’s, blood tests and kidney function tests, my knight in shining armour of a urologist performed a robotic laparoscopic pyeloplasty where he had to remove the stone, remove the kinked section of my ureter and reattach my ureter to my kidney and put in a stent. I am pretty tolerable when it comes to pain but holy heck the recovery for that surgery was so so hard and the pain from the stent was something I would never wish on anyone. It took me a month to stand up straight without looking like the hunchback and I’m only now starting to feel like myself again. My stent was removed 6 weeks after surgery but thankfully they put me to sleep for it!

The scars are the least of my worries but when I think back to before knowing I had a stone, there were so many instances in the past 2 years where I had pain on my right side and ignored it thinking I would be a drama queen for going to the doctors. If I could go back I would but I am just so thankful this is all over and my kidney didn’t need to be removed. I just pray I never have another kidney stone again.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk lol