Generally, you can trust your organs to stay in one place. Sure, they may puff up with air or constrict to pump blood, but they do so in the same location in your body.
That wasn’t the case for a young woman in Michigan, however, who told doctors she felt like “a ball was rolling inside of her” when she would go from lying down to standing up. The “ball,” it turned out, was her right kidney.
According to a new report of her case, the 28-year-old woman had a rare condition known as a floating kidney. For nearly six years, she had experienced abdominal pain on her right side that felt worse when she was standing but better when she was lying down. She also told doctors that the pain was reduced toward the end of a recent pregnancy.
Hard to diagnose
“A floating kidney is a hard condition to diagnose, and it’s not that common,” Sood said.
One reason it could be hard to detect the condition is that, if a CT scan is done, this scan is taken while the person is lying down, so the kidneys would look like they were in a normal position in the body, Sood said; therefore, doctors might not suspect that something is wrong. For the woman in this case, her problems and pain occurred only when she was standing, he added.
The woman didn’t have pain when she was reclining because her kidney stayed in its normal position, and she also felt better in late pregnancy because her larger uterus provided support from below for the kidney, so it would not move down into her pelvis, Sood explained.
To treat the problem and eliminate the woman’s pain, doctors needed to do an operation known as a “nephropexy.” In this procedure, doctors made small incisions in her abdomen and put stitches into the capsule of the kidney, which covers its outer surface, and tied it to the back wall of her body, Sood said. This holds the kidney in place and prevents it from flopping down, he said.
