Best wishes for your wife and you Al. It really makes you feel helpless when someone you love is in pain and there is nothing you can do about it.
I worked with a guy who had a lot of stones, and passed at least one a month. He had a presciption for Oxycontin (??), and carried a couple of pills with him all of the time, just in case. His problem was genetic, but he told me that his doctor told him that drinking anything brown greatly contributes to them, so he always drank clear soft drinks.
Maybe a funny story will cheer you up a little. I had another friend who would get stones occasionally. Big, long-haired biker dude. I was visiting him in the hospital on one of his bouts with a stone, and he was getting bored, so he said "Watch this". He started screaming and rang for the nurse. When she came rushing in, he collapsed on the bed, and held out the little silver pan that he was supposed to whizz in. In it, was the pit from the peach he had eaten earlier. The nurse almost fainted. All, in all, it was pretty funny.
