Start here
Renal colic is routinely described as among the worst pain people experience, and comparisons to childbirth are common rather than exaggerations. If you were sent home with a leaflet and told to drink more water, you were not given much. This page is the rest of it.
Before anything else
Go back to hospital now if you have a fever alongside flank pain, are vomiting and cannot keep fluids down, or cannot pass urine. A blocked and infected kidney is a genuine emergency and is treated urgently. Nothing else on this page is more important than that paragraph.
The part nobody explains
Treating a stone and preventing the next one are two different appointments. The people who got you through the pain were doing acute care — nobody in that room was responsible for what happens next year.
That gap is not an oversight by any individual. It is how the system is organised. Which means the next step is usually one you have to start yourself, and asking is the normal way it begins rather than being a nuisance.
The number worth knowing: roughly half of people who form one stone form another within about ten years. That is the reason this is worth your attention now, while it is still fresh — and it is a number that responds to what you do.
Three things worth finding out
In this orderOne
Stones are not all the same substance, and prevention differs by type. If you passed a stone or had one removed, it may have been sent for analysis — and the result may be sitting in your records with nobody having mentioned it.
This is the single most common gap we see. One phone call to ask changes what every other piece of advice is worth, because without it everything you read is generic.
Two
It is the standard way of working out why you form stones rather than simply that you did. Whether a first-time stone former needs one is a genuine clinical judgement and opinions differ — which makes it a reasonable thing to raise rather than assume.
Three
Not every urology practice does. Many focus on removing stones, which is a different job. Four questions on the phone sort this out before you spend a copay finding out in the room.
Take the questions with you
Most people know what they want to ask and lose it somewhere between the waiting room and the seven minutes they actually get. Two things that help:
The things you are about to be told
What the research actually foundIn the next few weeks people will recommend things to you with great confidence — apple cider vinegar, cranberry juice, cutting out calcium. Some of it is reasonable, some of it points the wrong way, and the evidence is usually thinner than the confidence.