Intermittent Dark Urine: Precursor to Kidney Stone or Something Else?
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I'm posting this under kidney stones but I'll be honest: I'm just going off of past experiences because I don't know for sure if it's kidney stone related just yet.
Six years ago I learned I had a kidney stone in my system from a scan. A couple months later I noticed my urine was significantly darker than I was was used to. I can't remember if it was just a very dark yellow or if it had tints of red, orange or brown to it. Memories are fickle and I didn't take pictures. I also don't remember if I experienced it for for a matter of days or a matter of weeks, I just remember that it was intermittent and disconcerting. Sometimes it would be dark and sometimes it would be, for lack of a better term, normal. I didn't have any other noticeable symptoms going on. Then one night I experienced a sudden, sharp and thankfully brief pain in my back. I threw up and immediately felt better. The pain went away. I'd passed the stone. My pee went back to normal after that. I am assuming that whatever was making my urine darker, the stone was ultimately to blame.
Flash forward to this year. Last month specifically. I started experiencing cloudy and brownish urine. It came out of the blue and without any other noticeable symptoms like back pain or jaundice or a burning sensation when urinating. I read that dark urine could be cause by dehydration so I started taking in a lot of fluids, but it was still abnormally dark pretty much every time I went to the bathroom for two straight days. Then it stopped. Then a few days later it came back. There didn't seem to be any pattern. I might go two days where my urine was dark and cloudy every time I went to the bathroom, then I might go three days where it looked normal every time, and then I might go a few days where it would be dark and cloudy in the morning and at night but normal looking during the day, like I had vampire urine that was only evil when the sun went down. I had some blood work done but it came back normal. I also had a urinalysis done and it too tested negative. After about two weeks of on again, off again dark urine it seemed to go away. For the first half of this month every time I went to the bathroom it was on the spectrum of yellow colors I was used to seeing
But a few days ago it came back, again out of the blue and without any other obvious symptoms. There was a noticeably darker tint to my urine in the morning, but when I went to the bathroom during the day it reverted back to it's normal appeared. That night though? It was so dark it looked like coffee. It was easily the darkest I'd ever seen it and it freaked me out. In the subsequent bathroom visits it wasn't nearly as dark but it wasn't normal either. It was clear but it was beige or peach tinted more than it was yellow. I was able to get another urinalysis ordered that day and the sample I presented was reassuringly normal looking: straw colored and not cloudy. At the same time it was disappointingly normal looking: straw colored and not cloudy. If I'm getting a urinalysis done because I'm complaining of dark brown, cloudy and frankly scary looking urine it's kind of embarrassing to present a sample that looks absolutely normal (Thankfully--I think?--the results of this urinalysis were different than the one from last month; There were traces of blood found in the urinalysis and confirmed by a microscopic urinalysis).
This morning it was back to looking like someone mixed some iced tea into my bladder when I wasn't looking. It wasn't as frighteningly dark as it was 36 hours before but it was definitely abnormal in appearance.
I have another visit with my doctor schedule a few days from now. I'm going to try to collect some samples at home. Or take some pictures. I'd like to have some evidence, even if they can't test it to determine the cause, that I'm not making up claims of just how dark this mystery pee is. I'll also try to create a diary of sorts. I'm guessing there will be some talk of additional testing too, maybe an ultrasound or more in depth blood work. Unless in the next two days I get a sudden onset of severe back pain that results in me throwing up and feeling better right away. Then I'll be pretty sure that it was a kidney stone (that seems to be my MO for kidney stones: both times I've had one I'll go from feeling totally fine to getting a sudden onset of back pain, vomiting, and then feeling better, all in an hour or less)
Has anyone else experienced this, where you're feeling pretty much fine in every possible way, but when you go to the pee it's like spinning a roulette wheel and you don't know if it's going to land on light or dark?
0 likes, 2 replies
Tremelo
Edited
I'll answer my own question about whether several days of mostly painless dark urine could be a kidney stone with an emphatic:
Maybe! (but not definitively)
The day after my post I experienced the telltale signs of a kidney stone: Increasingly intense pain one side of the lower back along with sweating and nausea. It took about two and a half hours to go from 'Huh my back hurts a little' to 'UGH I JUST WANT THIS ALL TO BE OVER!' And then it WAS over. The pain slowly subsided. The next trip to the bathroom I saw a couple large bits of detritus fly out but I didn't have a filter to catch them and couldn't retrieve them (the one bit I thought I retrieved seemed to soft and spongy to be a stone and felt more like soft tissue)
I had an appointment with my doctor for the next day. Even after I thought I passed the stone I was still experiencing 3-5 episodes of pain a day in the same area of my back. They weren't as intense and didn't last as long but they were concerning. He suggested that sometimes kidney stones can break up and then travel down the flume of the ureter in bits. But he also cautioned that it was uncommon for someone to experience dark urine for several days without pain so he ordered up a CT scan that is currently scheduled to be 2 weeks from now.
After 2-3 days the color of my urine returned to normal. Over the next few days the lower back pain episodes became shorter and less intense and eventually they went away too.
For the next 5 days everything was fine. No pain. No unexpected colors in the toilet bowl. I was starting to breathe a sigh of relief, again.
But then the dark urine came back, again.
It's a darker yellow this time, maybe borderline orange. It's not as visually scary as the iced tea colored urine and certainly not as terrifying as the black coffee colored urine, and so far there's no pain associated with it. But I'm growing frustrated. I've pondered asking the doctor if I could move the CT scan up to this week just so I can get some answers, but I figure as long as dark pee is the only real symptom it's probably not something that can reasonably be expedited.
Tremelo
Edited
And now the final chapter of answering the question 'Is it a kidney stone?'
On the one hand I did have pain very similar to a kidney stone in mid June, so that seemed like solid evidence in favor of a kidney stone. But on the other hand in the weeks leading up to that pain and the weeks following it I had several instances of dark urine varying from dark orange to coffee black and not much pain at all. On top of that my doctor cautioned that usually you don't have that much internal bleeding caused by kidney stones without significantly more pain and was concerned it might be cancer so he ordered a CT scan.
The final verdict is in now and yes, it was a kidney stone.
I hadn't had any kidney stone-like pain for several weeks, but the dark urine came and went intermittently. On the day before I was scheduled to get a CT scan something came out. It looked like it might have been a stone so I collected it and had it tested, but it was weird because it had been weeks since I'd felt any pain. Was it just swimming around down there, taking its time before exiting? Or was it something else? A bladder stone? Or some other kind of growth or foreign body?
Over the course of the next week I got both my CT scan results and my stone analysis results. The CT scan results looked fine for someone my age with no signs of tumors in any of my abdominal organs. Then the stone sample came back a few days later as a calcium oxalate stone. Apparently it had just taken it's own sweet time coming out.
It's now been 10 days since my scan and things are pretty much back to normal. So I'm closing this little chapter here. While I don't relish the thought of getting another kidney stone, at least now I have more evidence that when I get one, dark urine without any other pain or symptoms could indeed be a precursor that one is on the way.