A 75-year-old woman kept coming back to the hospital with fever and left flank pain. The cause was not a stone or a stubborn bacterium. Part of her ureter, the tube carrying urine from kidney to bladder, had slipped sideways out of the pelvis through a gap normally occupied by the sciatic nerve.
Her case was published Aug. 31 in the Journal of Surgical Case Reports by surgeons at Teikyo University School of Medicine's Mizonokuchi Hospital in Kawasaki, Japan. The authors count 48 cases of ureterosciatic hernia in the medical literature.
