69-year-old Mike Brainerd can tell you a thing or two about kidney stones. He's had around 40 of them in the past 30 years.
"I have the record in two states for the most and the biggest," Brainerd said
Brainerd says he's gotten more used to the pain, but that's not saying much.
"I had one doctor who said it's like having a baby through your ears," Brainerd said.
"Women will have contractions, and they'll last for 30 seconds to a minute, and then they'll get relief from the pain. With kidney stone pain they get the pain, and it can last for five minutes, 10 minutes, two hours, or four hours. Until that stone moves, the pain will not go away," Urologist Dr. David Arend said.
But there are some steps you can take to prevent kidney stones. That starts with drinking plenty of water.
"We usually recommend getting between two and three liters of water a day, especially for people who have formed stones in the past," Arend said.
Dr. David Arend says it can also help to limit how much salt you eat and add lemon juice to your water.
"Lemon juice is high in citrate, and citrate binds to calcium in the urine and helps prevent these stones from forming," Arend said.
Arend says our diet is to blame for the increase in the number of people battling kidney stones. 10 to 15 percent of Americans will have to deal with the painful problem sometime in their life.
"We're starting to see it a lot more, especially in this part of the U.S.," Arend said.
"There for a while I was having them about every three months," Brainerd said.
While Brainerd says, given the choice, he would still pass on passing a kidney stone, but at least treatment has gotten better.
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