Kidney stones occur when your urine concentrates as acid salt and mineral deposits inside the kidney. Where most often these materials simply leave your body with urination, when they form into stones they can cause a great deal of pain. The Mayo Clinic states they rarely cause permanent or serious damage to your body. There are treatments for kidney stones---called renal lithiasis---the simplest of which is drinking a lot of water.
Pain
There usually are no symptoms of kidney stones when they remain in your kidneys. The symptoms typically begin when the stone finds its way into the connector tube between the bladder and kidney called the ureter. The most common symptoms then include some form of pain.
For example, the first signs often are pain in your back or pain in one side of your body underneath where the ribs end. These pains may fluctuate in intensity. The sharpest pain may happen for 20 minutes to an hour, then subside, but may return later. There also may be radiating waves of pain from the back or side that find their way into the groin or abdominal area.
Finally, you may experience pain while you are urinating. This pain may occur while the kidney stone is in transition before you actually pass it. While it may continue when you pass the stone, often the pain has lessened by the time it comes out.
Urination
Aside from the pain you may experience when you are passing a kidney stone, there also may be other urinary difficulties. For example, you may feel the need to urinate urgently even immediately after urinating. This can persist for hours. Your urine during this period also may contain blood, from a little to an entire stream. This blood may be caused by the stone's passage through the ureter or the urethra, the tube from the bladder out. If you do not see blood, you may see cloudiness in your urine or sense an usually bad odor from your urine.
Other Symptoms
The kidney stone's passage may induce uneasy feelings in your stomach that include vomiting and nausea. There also may be a feeling of the need to defecate, even if you cannot go. If there is an infection associated with the kidney stone's passage, you also may experience chills and a fever while it is making its way through your system.
