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?