Curt Oliver

Welcome to our CaringBridge website. We are using it to keep family and friends updated in one place. We appreciate your support and words of hope and encouragement. Thank you for visiting.   The photo is of Curt when he arrived home on November 15, 2017 from his first hospital stay.

I will try my best to provide a brief history of what has been going on with Curt Oliver this past month.  Curt has had multiple myeloma for the past few years.  Last summer, 2016, he had pain in his right neck where the cancer was eating away at a neck bone.  He did a regimen of chemo and things were going along quite fine.   In early October of this year he developed a pain in his chest bone.  That was the cancer at work again.  This started a series of tests which revealed that his cancer had mutated and became quite aggressive.  He started a new chemo treatment.

November 12th his right arm became very sore.  We went to the ER and the multiple myeloma had eaten away in his humerus bone just below his shoulder.   The bone was fractured.  He was then admitted to the hospital for what ended up a 3 night stay.  The doctors were not able to set the bone and the effects of his chemo and the cancer would delay any easy healing of the break.  The treatment was to provide pain relief.  During this hospital stay the goal was to determine the best pain killers for him to take at home.  He was released on November 15th.

November 16th his arm pain greatly increased and we returned to the ER.  He had broken the rest of the right arm.  We returned home with pain medicine and a two week out appointment with an orthopedic doctor to address how to set his broken arm.

November 19th in the early morning Curt was having really bad pain in his lower right abdomen.  We went back to the ER for the 3rd time in the week.  This time it was diagnosed as severe diverticulitis with a punctured bowel.   He was immediately admitted to the hospital and put on an IV only diet with no food or liquid allowed by mouth.  The doctors wanted to treat his abdomen with strong antibiotics.  In the early morning of the 23rd, Thanksgiving Day, he had extreme pains and emergency surgery was needed.  The colon rectal surgeons ended up removing the sigmoid portion of his large intestine. They diverted his small intestine in a procedure called an ileostomy.  Curt will now be wearing an external ileostomy bag for the next 3 to 4 months while his bowels heal.  This 3 hour surgery was very serious.  We were lucky to be in such a good hospital when this occurred. 

After about a week of IV only he was allowed to start a liquid broth and Jell-O diet.  Once he adjusts to starting to eat food he will progress to a low fiber diet for at least 4 to 6 weeks while the healing continues in his abdomen.