Michael McCormic, Jr.
For ClarkCountyToday.com
AMBOY — Craig and Krista Wigginton watch contently as their four children romp through the family’s wide-open pasture, the sun overhead and the mountains in plain view. Their youngest whizzes by on a quad, her arms barely long enough to reach the handles.
As the family tends to their 40-acre farm with care, any onlooker would be shocked to find that a mere six years ago, Craig was bedridden with Lyme disease and the family was struggling to function through daily life.
In 2006, Craig Wigginton began to show symptoms of a chronic illness that doctors were unable to identify. It was not until after a family friend suggested that he may be suffering from Lyme disease that the Wiggintons were able to seek and eventually obtain a concrete diagnosis.
“It felt like I had the flu, but it was June and I felt like I had to schedule some time off work,” Craig remembers. “It kicked in hard early in the year in January a couple years later.”
In fact, Craig, 39, did not experience the full force of Lyme disease until 2011, five years after the symptoms first began to show. At that time, Krista was a full-time mom, as their fourth child, Clara, had just recently celebrated her first birthday. With her husband constantly bedridden and dealing with chronic pain and exhaustion, many of the previously shared responsibilities of the household fell solely on Krista.
“As his wife and the mom of our four kids, it was up to me to run the home.” Krista, also 39, painfully explains. “It was too much effort (for him) to even change a lightbulb or take the garbage out.”
Fortunately for Craig, his job allowed him to work from home during the time he was ill. Still, the miserable image of him sitting at the kitchen table in the middle of summer, in front of a space heater, bundled in a hoodie and staring blankly at his computer while violent tremors shook his entire body is permanently seared into Krista’s mind.
“We really were in a season of survival. There was so much uncertainty,” recalls Krista, citing the Biblical proverb that states, “Hope deferred makes the heart grow sick.”
This “hope deferred” of which she speaks lies in the numerous treatments that their family sought for Craig throughout his years of battling Lyme disease. At this point in time, there is no known cure for the illness. Antibiotics are proven to remove the bacteria from the body that is responsible for the onset of the disease, but side effects linger regardless of whether or not the bacterial infection is present. This is what makes it such a difficult condition to overcome. For the Wigginton family, this meant trying treatment after treatment, often with little or no improvement.
“If you’ve never struggled with chronic pain or a chronic condition, your expectations lower month by month and you begin to try to settle into what life could look like now if this is going to be new and normal,” Craig explains.
Eventually, however, the treatments began to take effect little by little, and in 2014, Craig found himself at what he calls “70 percent functioning.” (Although Krista insists it was closer to 60 percent.) Though back to a normal work week, he was getting just the meat and potatoes of life. Having tried treatment that ranged from traditional modern medicine to very alternative methods, the family was beginning to lose hope that Craig would ever return to his normal self.
“His smile was not reaching his eyes,” Krista recalls. “He would come home tired and exhausted and just smile in his mouth, but then eat something and go to bed.”
It was then that Krista, in a last-ditch effort, purchased a starter kit of essential oils. In somewhat of a happy accident, she attended a class on essential oils simply for the purpose of escaping her daily life for a few hours, but it turned out to be a decision that would change their family on multiple levels.
“I remember hearing about essential oils and I just knew that this was something that we were supposed to do for our family,” Krista claims.
“I had all the standard objections when Krista came home,” Craig adds. “But I was at that point so uninterested that Krista just said, ‘Hey, Craig, here’s our plan.’”
Krista and Craig cannot say for certain that using these oils swept away the last remaining symptoms of Lyme disease. What they do know is that somewhere in the mix of traditional and alternative medicine and everything in between, they were given a second chance at health and a happy life, and the use of these oils has played a part in that.
In the three years that have passed since Krista’s fateful decision, Craig now operates at what he would call “100 percent functioning,” and his wife has become a professional distributor of essential oils, and their four children are growing up happier and healthier than they have ever been. To say that they believe, at the very least, in the health benefits of using these oils would be a gross understatement.
“It was about a week into using the essential oils that I saw Craig smile again,” says Krista. “The smile was no longer just in his mouth, it was in his eyes. I knew we had found something really special.”
In 2016, as a combined result of Craig’s newfound health and Krista’s newfound occupation, the Wigginton family was able to fulfill a lifelong dream of owning and operating a farm. After purchasing a piece of property that they discovered through a connection in Krista’s essential oil network, Krista, Craig, and Co. set about making their dream a reality. While they wait for construction to begin on the new farmhouse, the family occupies the leaky box with haphazardous cedar walls that came with the property.
“It’s a really unique piece of property,” says Craig. “It had never been on the market before; it was homesteaded back in the 1800s.”
The current plan is to use a rotational feeding system for sheep and chickens, the only animals on the farm, save two sheepdogs and a fresh litter of kittens. Craig and Krista’s sons, Ethan and Evan, are the family shepherds, while their oldest daughter, Alainna, is the designated “chicken whisperer.” The youngest, Clara, really likes the ATV. While they are “starting small,” with chickens and sheep, the farm may someday graduate on to larger livestock.
For Craig, it is truly a childhood dream come true.
Krista, recalling one of Craig’s early childhood drawings says, “As a young boy, he drew a picture of his dream house. There was a house, and then there was ‘The Cow-Roaming Place.’”
For the Wigginton family, a dream has become reality, but not before they survived a living nightmare. Krista and Craig have navigated chronic illness and emotional despair, discovered new health balance through essential oils, fulfilled a lifelong dream, and grown closer together as a family through it all.
“We get one shot at this thing and we’ve been given a second chance at health, so we gotta do this,” Explains Krista. “We gotta do this crazy farm thing.”
