I had two...several years apart. The first was really bad (to me, anyway). Went to the hospital, where they let me lie there hurting for an hour while they tested to be sure it wasn't other things.... then they put in an IV and the nurse turned a valve.....and suddenly I felt nothing. Dilaudid! I happily counted ceiling tiles for vague amounts of time, until they took me for more tests...dye in the system to see where the stone was. Turns out the pressure from the test pushed the stone thru into the bladder. 3 days later, I 'excreted' it into a cup. It was unbelievable something that small could hurt that much! They say it's the closest a man will ever come to understanding childbirth.

Now...they said that diet could be part of creating stones, and I did have a smaller stone several years later. I don't 'think' I have changed my diet, but it's now been 9-10 years and no repeats.

They also said that serious stones too large to pass may be treated with ultrasound to gradually break them up, along with some chemical dissolvers. I never had to find out. They sent me to a specialist who said that, for money, they could do some tests to find out why my body made stones... I declined.

One interesting memory from the hospital: As I lay moaning on a gurney in one of those curtained alcoves, I heard footsteps coming down the hall. They paused outside, and a doctor pulled back the curtain, looked at me and asked: "Kidney stone?"
I gasped "That's..mooaann...what they think it is."
He nodded..."That's what it sounded like."
I guess all those tests could have been bypassed if they'd just called him.