Having a kidney stone on a Friday afternoon used to mean a weekend spent doubled over in pain, drugged and nauseated, waiting until the local hospital could get the traveling kidney stone blaster from the other hospitals that were earlier in line.
Not anymore.
Utah Valley Regional Medical Center recently invested in a stationary lithotripsy table, a $1 million piece of equipment that blasts kidney stones. Prior to this, UVRMC was on a list with several other hospitals for a mobile table that came when they scheduled it, which meant patients in kidney stone pain stayed that way for a while.
"They compare it to having a baby," nurse Brian Lee, the operating room manager, said. "Men are not very happy about it."
In a lithotripsy, the patient lies on the table while health care providers use X-rays to locate the kidney stone and then adjust the machinery so it is sending targeted sound waves at the stone. Eventually the waves dissolve the stone into a passable size. That part of the process takes about an hour. It's almost always effective. The after-effects are minimal.
Yet kidney stones remain a nightmarish experience, and not just because the swelling that results from the blockage in the ureter causes agonizing pain. Since most hospitals don't have a machine on hand, patients who come into the ER are given pain medication and sent home or checked into the hospital until the machine comes, which at best is a couple of days.
For the worst case scenario, there's Andria Sainsbury. She stumbled back into the house after leaving for work one morning; her husband, watching her sink lower and lower in her seat, knew something was wrong. They went to an InstaCare, which prescribed painkillers and told her to see if it would pass.
A week of painkillers later, it hadn't. She had to have a stent put in allowing urine to bypass the stone. By the time the hospital had gotten the lithotripsy table, she'd developed an infection and had to be admitted. From start to finish, the kidney stone consumed two weeks.
Had she been in the same situation today, she likely would have left the hospital a few hours after she arrived -- no infection, no added painkillers, no hospital stay, no prolonging the pain that is, she confirmed, worse than giving birth.
"I can't tell you how huge this is," she said.
Sainsbury, who has a genetic tendency toward kidney stones and has had dozens in the last seven years, is one of about 1.2 million Americans who have a kidney stone each year. However, although lithotripsy is a frequent procedure, the table has simply been too expensive for one facility to have one permanently. Yet Lee said they expect the machine to pay for itself in three years, considering they're averaging about one procedure a day. One day there were seven.
Lee also is optimistic that people from throughout northern Utah will drive a little farther and get the kidney stone blasted right away.
"We hope so," he said. "That's the plan."
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