A 20-year-old woman from Taiwan recently underwent surgery to have no less than 300 small stones removed from her right kidney.

The young woman, identified as Xiao Yu by Taiwanese media, was admitted to a hospital in the city of Tainan earlier this month, after complaining of severe pain in her lower back. She also had a fever and a blood test showed an unusually high white blood cell count. Doctors ordered a CT scan which showed that Yu’s right kidney was full of fluid and virtually full of kidney stones. The first order of business was to put the young woman on antibiotics, then drain the fluid from her kidney, and finally perform minimally invasive surgery to remove the hundreds of stones.

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Seeing his wife go through the excruciatingly painful process of passing kidney stones, a farmer in Jiangxi Province, China, created an ingenious bed that flips over and vibrates to help dislodge the stones.

Zhu Qinghua, a 52-year-old rice farmer from Jiangxi had been thinking of ways of helping his wife since 1993, when she had her left kidney removed because of kidney failure, and stones were discovered in her right one. Doctors told them that surgery to remove the stones was too dangerous for a person with one kidney, so she was advised to eliminate them naturally before they became too large. Zhu says inspiration struck in 1997, when doctors advised his wife to stand upside down for a few minutes every day, to help dislodge the kidney stones. That’s when he started working on his patented kidney stone-removing bed.

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