Kidney infections can cause you a lot of pain and discomfort, and they can even turn out to cause permanent damage to your body if it goes undiagnosed and untreated for too long. Sometimes, a kidney infection can accompany a range of diseases – and in severely advanced cases of the disease, the permanent damage done to the kidneys will mean that you have no choice but to be put on the organ transplant list.
This could take months to years, sometimes even decades before the damage that has been done to your body can be reversed. In many cases, it unfortunately can’t. You should keep your kidneys as healthy as possible, and you will want to catch any symptoms of a kidney infection early on. How will you know if you have the potential of an infection that’s coursing through your body? Here are ten of the general kidney infection symptoms that you should be looking out for.
1. Change in Urine Colour
One of the first changes that will take place in your body when you have a kidney infection is a change in the colour of the urine: To understand why this happens, you have to first understand just what the kidneys do as part of the body. The kidneys act as the body’s internal filtration system, and everything you do to your body – and which is expelled through your urine – has to make its way through your kidneys.
Thus, one of the first signs that there is something wrong with your kidneys is any change in the colour of your urine. Usually in the case of a kidney infection, you’ll note that the urine is much darker than it would normally be – though sometimes lighter. Accompanying this, a burning sensation when urinating is common with a kidney infection, and in the more advanced stages of the disease you will also see blood in urine.