Backache - muscles or kidneys? How can you tell the difference?

[Tzibeleh]

11yo dd has an intermittent, severe backache over her left kidney area.

She is otherwise well.

She is prone to UTIs, but has never been actively unwell with them and is often virtually asymptomatic except for smelly urine, urgency and frequency. She currently has smelly urine.

OTOH the backache came on yesterday, after a morning of vigorous trampolining.

Advice, please?

?

Well, have you taken a urine sample to gp? If it's a UTI then it needs to be treated- even more so if it's turned into a kidney infection- untreated this can scar kidneys causing long term damage. Could also be just muscle strain.

They can't accept a sample on the weekend. I wouldn't be able to take it until tomorrow anyway.

The pain has eased a lot, and she's no worse in herself, so I suspect it was only a muscle. If she had got worse, fever, etc, I would not have waited, but taken her to OHC or even A&E today.

But is there a difference in the pain? If it was kidneys, would pressing there have made it hurt more, for example?

I used to wake up with back ache each morning which I eventually realised wasn't due to me sleeping in an odd position and tweaking a muscle each night but due to my kidneys as I wasn't drinking enough. How did I realise this? The pain disappeared within 30 mins - an hour of me drinking a pint of water and I didn't suffer from it on nights when I'd had a couple of drinks and the drunk a pint of water on going to bed to avoid a hangover; it ached rather than hurt; the ache was on both sides of my back; the ache didn't change if I moved position, for example, it didn't get worse if I stretched or bent whereas with muscular back ache, I may not have been able to bend or stretch or, on doing so, would have felt some resistance or increased pain.

I would still take a sample today if I were you