What are kidney or bladder stones?
Kidney stones are made of salts and minerals in the urine that stick together to form small pebbles. They can be as small as grains of sand or as large as golf balls. They may stay in your kidneys or travel out of your body through the urinary tract. The urinary tract is the system that makes urine and carries it out of your body. It is made up of the kidneys, the tubes that connect the kidneys to the bladder (the ureters), the bladder, and the tube that leads from the bladder out of the body (the urethra). When a stone travels through a ureter, it may cause no pain. Or it may cause great pain and other symptoms.
