When Chrissi Anderson went to the hospital for a burst appendix, a CT scan uncovered a shocking extra finding: She had a 1-pound kidney stone lurking in her body.
“I couldn't believe it. It was huge and it had horns, and it was like a monster,” Anderson, 61, who lives in Omaha, Nebraska, tells TODAY.com.
“And they're like, that's what's growing inside your kidney. It was just massive.”
Anderson had never had kidney stones before and says she didn’t have any symptoms — at least none she recognized at the time.
That’s not surprising with staghorn kidney stones, the type Anderson had, which typically grow to be very large, says Dr. Euclid de Souza, her urologist at CHI Health Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha.
“The problem with staghorns is they're very silent because they are big and they cannot move, whereas people complain about the small stones because they move,” de Souza tells TODAY.com.
“The smaller the stone, usually more the pain, because they can move around, block the kidney, so the urine has nowhere to go. Whereas these stones have found a home for themselves in the kidney, and they don't move around, so urine drains around them.”
The next step was figuring out how to remove the giant stone.
Kidney Stone With 'Antlers'
Anderson’s unexpected ordeal began in January when she went to the emergency room after she started feeling excruciating pain in her right lower back one night.
She was diagnosed with a ruptured appendix. Doctors then told her it was a “blessing” of sorts since a CT scan for that emergency also revealed the silent stone in her right kidney. If it had kept growing undetected, Anderson would have ultimately lost her kidney, de Souza says.
Staghorn kidney stones are named after their unique branching shape — they look like antlers on a deer head.
They often form because of repeated urinary tract infections, according to the Urology Care Foundation. Women get them twice more frequently than men, studies have found.
Anderson’s stone filled her whole kidney, de Souza says. He believes it had been growing there for years.
Most of the kidney stones he removes are about 5 millimeters in size, or less than a quarter of an inch, and weigh a fraction of an ounce.
Anderson’s stone was about 3 inches across for the “head of the deer” and another 3 inches for the “antlers,” de Souza says. He estimates it weighed close to 1 pound.
The heaviest kidney stone ever removed from a person weighed 1.76 pounds, according to Guinness World Records.
Stone Can Regrow
After waiting for the infection to settle down in her belly from the ruptured appendix, de Souza removed Anderson’s kidney stone with robotic-assisted surgery on March 17.
It was so big that he couldn’t take it out in one piece.
“We had a stone crusher that we were able to use to break up where the big part was connected to the finger-like projections,” he says.
After Anderson came out of surgery, doctors showed her the “four great big parts” in what “looked like an ice cream bowl,” she recalls.
She’s recovering well and says the pressure she’d been feeling in her back and legs, which she previously blamed on fibromyalgia, is gone.
Her right kidney function has improved, though her left kidney had already taken over the majority of the work, and it will likely stay that way, de Souza says.
Anderson is at risk for forming stones again, so she will be monitored with regular scans.
Her giant kidney stone was sent to a lab for analysis. Anderson hopes she’ll be able to keep it.
“I hope they’ll give it to me and I can put it in resin,” she says.
