I am a PA who has worked in Urology and now work in Emergency Medicine. I asked one of my patients what his first kidney stone felt like. “Well Doctor, first I was afraid I was going to die. Then I was afraid I wasn’t.”
A 2mm stone can hang out at the junction of the ureter and the bladder and not cause many symptoms or it may have passed into the bladder. The only way to be certain is to perform another CT and that’s expensive and a lot of unnecessary radiation so I would just wait.
Existing stones cannot be dissolved. Formation of new stones can be prevented. Mix one ounce of concentrated lemon juice into one quart of water and drink that every day. The citric acid will displace the oxalic acid in your kidney and form calcium citrate which is water soluble. Calcium oxalate is not and that’s what makes up 85% of kidney stones.
Last week I treated a 17 year old female who was having her second kidney stone. I told her she was a stoner to which she took great offense. That was refreshing coming from a 17 year old! I educated her about drinking lemon juice and her mother stated that she would see to it that this happened. Unfortunately the CT showed that she has another stone forming in the mid-pole of the left kidney that will drop someday. DEFINITELY a stoner!
The largest stone I ever encountered belonged to an unfortunate man who came into the urology practice for lithotripsy. The interior of his kidney was one giant 25mm mass of calcium oxalate. It is tricky to use lithotripsy on a stone that is inside the kidney due to the possibility of organ damage from the sound waves. The “stone” (more like a mineral deposit) was successfully fractured, a stent was placed in the ureter, and two weeks later I saw the patient in the office and he was still passing gravel. Ouch!
I forgot one thing. All stoners need to limit their intake of oxalate. Their bodies don’t metabolize it properly and this is what leads to the formation of stones. Visit this site:
https://www.upmc.com/-/media/upmc/patients-visitors/...pdfs/low-oxalate-diet.pdf
It has an easy-to-understand list of high, medium, and low oxalate foods. Unfortunately many of your favorite foods are in the high oxalate list...
When I had my attack some years a go, the CT scan also found a 2mm and 1 mm stone in one of the lobes. I passed the 2mm stone about 4 months later and the 1 mm stone 5 months after that.