Hunter Creek
Bob and I met in 2011 and married in 2012, blending our two families together, which consists of five children and now six grandchildren. Back in 2012, Bob was working for Patterson Dental as a Dental technician. And I was the WIC Coordinator for Douglas County. I worked closely with families of children under the age of five. I assisted with providing medical screenings, nutrition education and access to healthy foods; as well as breastfeeding education. I never planned to leave this position and truly felt like it was my calling. However in 2015, we lost my daughter to SUDEP (Sudden Death in Epilepsy). Afton was only 22 and was getting ready to graduate from College of the Ozarks with a degree in Business Management. She was being scouted by Dillards Department Store and was getting ready to be offered a “Buyers” Position for one of their stores in Texas. On March 15, 2015, after a full day of classes and work both on and off campus; SUDEP suddenly and without warning took her from us. As you can imagine, the effects of her loss were devastating. She was not only my daughter, but as she grew into adulthood, she had become my best friend. The worst part of it all, was that we knew nothing about SUDEP. We had never been warned. The topic had never been discussed and we knew absolutely nothing about it. Within days of her death, it became my mission to find answers. To determine why this could have happened and why her medical care team had never told us this was a possibility; despite the fact that she had 7 out of 10 risk factors for SUDEP!
I spent the next several years researching. Reading everything I could get my hands on about this disease and why it was killing so many young people. The prime age for SUDEP to strike is between the ages of 17 and 25. And it usually strikes overachieving young people who are at university or working full-time. Afton was doing both. She worked hard and studied hard and we never knew that she would die before she walked across the stage at C of O and received her diploma. Her death was the hardest thing I have ever had to endure. And the misinformation, the lack of education from healthcare providers and the truth about the medical industry was almost as awful. I began uncovering so many untruths about healthcare. The more questions I had the more I found. And the more information and falsehoods were uncovered. It didn’t take long before my husband and I were looking at our own healthcare and questioning the medications we were taking. The direction our healthcare providers were taking us and whether or not we had all the information we needed to make truly educated and appropriate decisions for ourselves.
As a result of all that we were revealing through our research, we began to see other misconceptions and untruths. These were in the food industry. We had stumbled on the importance of good nutrition to help heal and cure conditions like diabetes, inflammation, high blood pressure and so many more conditions that one of both of us were suffering with. As we studied more and did more research we found that so much of what was making us sick, could be corrected with better eating. So in 2016 we began a journey to revamp our entire way of eating. We began with simple things like changing from margarine to butter. Real butter! Grass-fed butter! That quickly led to meeting with a local dietician who believed in growing her own food. And eating local and organic. We made changes where we could and began shopping differently. Paying attention to labels and additives. Trying to weed out the bad stuff and replace it with things that we could trace back to a local farm or local grower.
While we were making big changes, we were still far from perfect and still consuming a lot of “the stuff” we had eaten for years. It was then in 2019 that I was diagnosed with breast cancer and had to have a lumpectomy that we began getting even more serious about the things that we were putting in our mouths. Unfortunately following 22 radiation treatments, I then contacted covid in 2020 and did not rebound well. My symptoms were very mild, unlike my husband who now suffers with chronic scarring to his lungs following his battle with covid that put him in the hospital in ICU for a week. While he was suffering much more than me, my bout with covid resulted in kidney failure. While the symptoms at first didn’t prompt me to run to the doctor. I spent about a year suffering from increased fatigue, shortness of breath, high blood pressure and the eventual inability to work. By that time I had opened a boutique in Ava (Blondie’s) and was no longer working for the Health Department. It was getting harder and harder to run my store. The hours were killing me, I wasn’t eating well and although I was not aware my kidney function was dropping significantly. By March of 2022, I was having surgery to put a catheter in my chest so that I could begin dialysis.
As you can imagine, going on dialysis changed everything. Not only did it turn my life upside down. I closed my store. I was running to Springfield three times a week. But it solidified the need to get serious about the food I was eating. I was faced with diet restrictions. I needed to pay closer attention to what I was consuming and the chemicals in my food could no longer be naively ignored. I spent the majority of the next year or so working to improve the kinds of foods Bob and I were eating. We worked harder to make organic foods a priority. We ate more foods from local growers and we made a commitment to start growing our own food and raising our own meat and protein sources. I also began making educated decisions to become my own advocate for my own personal healthcare. I didn’t just keep leaving all the decisions up to my physicians and care team. I reviewed my own lab work. I learned what the results meant and how they affected my care and my outcomes. I asked more questions, but also double checked the answers. Little by little, my health began to improve. My kidney function stabilized. I still had to have dialysis, but I was able to reduce the number of dialysis days to two and the time on dialysis from 3 hours to 2.5 hours. Significant accomplishments! I also chose to have bariatric surgery to help ensure that once I was placed on the kidney transplant list I would have a better chance at getting a kidney and keeping that kidney alive. I chose to have a duodenal switch procedure which presented a 90% chance of curing type 2 diabetes, which I had following surgery. I was lucky enough that the procedure did cure my diabetes and I am now no longer on insulin. I simply maintain my blood sugar now with healthy, organic, chemical free foods. I was also able to reduce the number of medications I was taking for high blood pressure and reduce the amount of medication I was taking for gout. All of which I had suffered from for over ten years. And while the surgery was a miracle for me. Maintaining my weight loss of 127 lbs and making sure that I was eating healthy and organically whenever possible became a huge necessity. That led to Bob and I beginning our homestead journey.
Prompted by my excitement to make homesteading a reality, Bob and I began making some significant changes. We purchased a greenhouse! We bought 26 chickens. We adopted two bunnies. And I began pickling and canning. Grateful for some amazing videos online, I was able to teach myself how to preserve and prepare foods in ways I had never done before. This led to looking at other ways I could improve what we were eating and begin to make our food from scratch here at home. I started researching granola one day. Looking at a number of recipes that were online. A lot of them called for things I didn’t really eat. And some used products like vegetable oil that I wasn’t willing to consume. And so over the course of about three weeks, I put together a recipe of my own with some influence from those I had seen online. And Hunter Creek farms granola was born. While it wasn’t named yet, I did share it with a number of my friends and wouldn’t you know they loved it. It was then, when I was looking for a way to help supplement our homesteading endeavors, that I wondered if I could turn it into a small business. So I began doing the research! Checking out Ava Farmers Market guidelines and schedule. I went to my first meeting for the AFM and the rest is pretty much history. We are now selling every week at the Farmers Market. I am making granola during the week for friends and family in Springfield. And my granola journey is now allowing me to grow sprouts, manufacture my lip balm that I created a few years ago and even sell my sourdough starter.
I never would have guessed that this homesteading adventure would be taking me in so many directions and creating such an amazing way of life for me and my family. But I sure am loving it. Our chickens should be laying around mid July. Our produce from our garden and greenhouse will be producing before long and my shelves are filling up quickly with homegrown and local foods from other producers and growers from Little Farm Store and the surrounding area. Our mission at Hunter Creek Farms is to improve the health and lives of our customers and local community through all natural homemade creations that utilize local organic ingredients and ethical processes. We truly feel it is time to get back to the basics. To share what we have with others, while we benefit from receiving from our local community of producers and growers. It’s time to take our health and lives back. It’s time to tell big pharma and the food industry that we’ve had enough. No more chemicals! No more making us sick. No more untruths or trying to pull the wool over our eyes. It’s time to feel good about the products we use and the food we consume.
We are excited to be joining LFS and sharing our products with all of you!
