If you want to know more about hypercalciuria and/or kidney stones, read on. Otherwise, skip it.
So a 24 hour urine collection test confirmed that I have hypercalciuria and that is the cause of my repeated kidney stones. The name, as you might guess, means excessive calcium. That’s what the stones are made of and my problems is that my kidneys strain out too much of it, leaving it to form stones. It’s hereditary, though the previous generations have only one instance to report: I’m on my fourth. Lucky me.
There is no cure, only treatment of symptoms. There are medications that will bind the calcium to sodium and get rid of the excess that way, at the expense of reduced potassium and lower blood pressure. I already live in the low range for blood pressure, so other than continuing to eat a banana a day, there’s no real change.
Medical science is pretty good at treating them when they become a problem, with lithotripsy or various other removal techniques (yanking it out with a basket, for instance, or a holmium laser blast— I have had both of those). But prevention is the mystery.
I looked into alternative/natural solutions before but never really followed up. This time, I mean business. First stop tomorrow is my local herbalist, to get some gravel root. Then I’ll make up a tincture (takes about 12 days to prepare) with a bottle of vodka I noticed in the liquor cabinet (leftovers from some houseguest). From all accounts it can reverse the process, actually breaking or dissolving existing stones. So we’ll try that and see if when I do a follow-up scan next year — or something awful happens in the meantime — things are any better.
I see that the prescribed medication has an interaction with gravel root, so I will have to choose.