This too shall pass

That's one of my favorite phrases.  It says a lot.  And, it did indeed pass. That is, I passed my kidney stone this afternoon.  My kidney is still a bit sore and I'm not sure if I still have some more chunks in there, but at the very least the big part is gone.

I've learned a bit about kidney stones today.  They're apparently calcium oxalate.  On webmineral there's no  listing of the anhydrous mineral. There are however three hydrous species: whewellite, weddellite and caoxite with 1, 2, and 3 moles water each.  The funniest one is the whewellite because that is described as forming in "low-temperature hydrothermal solutions...releasing methane."  That sounds just like my situation :)

I took some photos of it on the microscope at school today.  It certainly looks like a clump of minerals.  

They told me that it was about 2mm.  You can see it's clearly 3-4mm.  There are two distinct parts.  One is a clump of jagged pointy minerals.  The other part is a concentric part that looks a lot like an ooid.  

Clearly it must have been in me for a while to have formed that kind of deposit.

I'm supposed to take this to a urologist so he can analyze it and tell me what caused it.  But, we can analyze stuff like this in my lab.  We can measure calcium isotopes on the TIMS; we could put it in the XRD to see what minerals are there; as you know where there is calcium, there's usually strontium so we could measure the strontium isotopes on the TIMS. Eric suggested I should measure the strontium isotopes of it and then measure the isotopes of Rockstar (which I was drinking almost every day for a while), beer or chicken Ka Prao.  I wonder what a urologist is going to measure on it.