The 72-year-old man had come in for something else entirely. He arrived with eight hours of left flank pain and visible blood in his urine, and a CT scan found a stone in his left ureter, with the kidney above it backed up and swollen. His urinalysis showed 67 white blood cells per microliter against a reference range topping out at 15, indicating a urinary tract infection. He had a history of constipation and no previous abdominal surgery.
He had the stone broken up by ureteroscopic lithotripsy. The next day, someone shot a routine kidney-ureter-bladder radiograph, the kind ordered after a stone procedure to confirm nothing was left behind.
