STARKVILLE — The pain pierced Xaria Wiggins’ abdomen like a scorching-hot knife.
It was sharp. It was grueling. It wouldn’t stop.
Wiggins writhed in pain. She’d been through shoulder issues. She’d had injections in her knees. This was different.
She called her mother, Sheron Weeks-Wiggins for advice. Weeks-Wiggins, who’s spent more than 20 years in nursing, suggested it might be an appendix issue. Mississippi State women’s basketball trainer Olivia Vita-Farnsworth concurred. So too did another on-campus doctor.
Wiggins was rushed to OCH Regional Medical Center, just in case. A CAT scan showed her lungs were inflamed.
Doctors thought it was pneumonia, though she hadn’t shown any symptoms. Another scan of her entire torso was ordered for the next day. A blood clot had formed in Wiggins’ right lung.
Would she be able to play this year? What did it mean for her future? Was it fatal?
On that early October day, Xaria Wiggins was scared.
***
Wiggins never let the balloon fall below the clouds.
A balloon? What? No, really.
Seated alongside Dr. Angel Brutus, MSU’s Assistant Athletic Director of Counseling and Sport Psychology, Wiggins took deep, controlled breaths as a sensor attached to her earlobe measured her pulse. On the computer screen in front of her, the junior guard was forced to keep a digital hot air balloon from falling beneath the clouds with each ensuing breath.
When Wiggins gets nervous or anxious, she says, her heart rate spikes. The balloon exercise was a way for her to find a balance in controlling her breathing when things got tense.
“(Brutus) wanted me to get from that, like, ‘I’m in full control of my body,'” Wiggins explained. “That’s really what I got. I’m going to focus on my body.”
After being put on a three-month regimen of blood thinners to combat the clot in her right lung, Wiggins was largely limited in practices. She played in five-on-zero drills and went through individual work, but contact wasn’t an option. Should she catch an elbow or an errant rebound hit her, a bruise would follow and another clot could form.
Relegated to the sidelines for the bulk of workouts and through MSU’s first eight games, there was a loneliness in Wiggins’ struggle. Her teammates were, of course, supportive. First-year head coach Nikki McCray-Penson and her staff also ensured she felt like a part of the team. But there was still a growing sense of isolation and disappointment.
Some days were easy, almost normal, as if a slew of platelets and red blood cells hadn’t coagulated in her lung. Others were far more taxing.
Having spent the past two years largely as a reserve, the 2020-21 campaign was supposed to be Wiggins’ springboard season. She was an upperclassman and one of just four returners to play more than 14 minutes per contest a year ago. Alongside junior forward Jessika Carter, sophomore sensation Rickea Jackson and fourth-year do-it-all point guard Myah Taylor, she’d be the fourth figure in a dynamic quartet hellbent on bringing MSU its first national championship.
Wiggins leaned on her mom, who currently serves as the director of nursing for Sentara Pace back in Virginia. Brutus, too, proved a crucial sounding board when Wiggins’ mental health might dip.
“When we say, ‘We’re a family,’ we actually mean that,” Wiggins said in reference to her support system at MSU and Brutus, in particular. “We all love each other here, and we have all the support that we need.”
Slowly and deliberately, Wiggins trudged her way toward recovery. Gone was the agonizing pain of Oct. 2. Instead, it was replaced with taxing conditioning and renewed emphasis on finding a semblance of game shape. Pegged for an early January return by her doctors, Wiggins’ return to the lineup crept nearer and nearer.
***
Wiggins stared into Kentucky guard Rhyne Howard’s soul.
Matched up with the reigning Southeastern Conference Player of the Year for the second straight season, the memories of last year’s regular season meeting ran through Wiggins’ mind. Howard had gone off for 26 points on 10-of-22 shooting, including three 3-point buckets. Wiggins wouldn’t let it happen again.
With Howard bearing down toward the top of the key, Wiggins squared her body, backpedaled and shifted with every ensuing dribble. Howard danced around the top of the arc and toward the right-hand corner, bouncing the ball behind her back and side to side as she searched for separation. She never found it.
Dribbling to her right, Howard took an extra step, and a whistle blew. Wiggins had forced her into a travel.
“My whole perspective of that game was to try to stop her, don’t let her get anything at all,” Wiggins said. “As soon as I got on the court I was like, ‘Play defense. Lock her up.'”
Four possessions later, Wiggins gathered a feed on the top left wing. With just enough space between her and the rotating Kentucky defense, she splashed home a 3-pointer for her first points of the season.
“Welcome back, Xaria Wiggins!” ESPN play-by-play announcer Eric Frede exclaimed.
It was a triumphant return, shrouded by a demoralizing overtime loss to the Wildcats. Wiggins finished the night with seven points and an assist in 16 minutes of play, limited, in part, due to her continuing return to game shape.
“She was fresh, she was hype, obviously, because it was the first game back,” McCray-Penson told The Dispatch. “So there was a lot of adrenaline going in, but what I liked is she had a sense of confidence about her. She just got fatigued.”
Yet for the personal positives of the Kentucky loss, Wiggins’ actual return and subsequent appearances have been as winding and weaving as the veins that caused her issues in the preseason.
She was initially cleared for MSU’s win over Georgia in Athens, but her mother tested positive for COVID-19 on one of her twice weekly tests required by her office while she spent Christmas at home. The family quarantined in separate parts of their Virginia Beach house. Weeks-Wiggins, confused by the initial result, didn’t show any symptoms. A negative test followed. The initial test was deemed a false positive.
Unable to join the team in Athens in time for the game, Wiggins then had to test negative three times before being allowed back at MSU. A 13-hour car ride back to Starkville with her older brother Devonte followed.
Three days after her debut against Kentucky, Wiggins’ parents were streaming MSU’s Jan. 7 meeting with Florida on the SEC Network through the family’s Roku TV when their daughter collided with Gator guard Kiara Smith’s shoulder while fighting for a rebound off a free throw. Wiggins stepped off the line and clenched her forehead as if a migraine had settled in. She was later diagnosed with a concussion and forced to miss MSU’s game against Ole Miss that weekend.
“We were watching the game and I was like, ‘Oh. My. God. I know this is not just happening,'” Weeks-Wiggins conceded. “My husband just kept rewinding and rewinding and rewinding.”
Thursday, Weeks-Wiggins and her husband, Major Wiggins, will leave Virginia Beach at 3 a.m. and trek to northeast Mississippi to visit their daughter. The trip will include the usual jaunt to Starkville Cafe, where the Wiggins family is a known commodity. Like clockwork, Weeks-Wiggins says, a jar of the establishment’s patented duck butter is always waiting for her to bring home when they dine at the Main Street staple.
But Starkville’s varying eateries are only a piece of the puzzle. Major and Sheron will watch their daughter step on the floor in person for the first time this season against No. 4 South Carolina on Thursday night at Humphrey Coliseum. Sans the debilitating pain of months past, Wiggins has fully recovered from both the concussion and blood clot, though she remains in contact with doctors over the latter as a precautionary measure. She also still chats with Brutus regularly.
Wiggins’ 2020 campaign has ebbed and flowed with as many peaks and valleys as an EKG monitor. But after nearly four months of hell, Xaria Wiggins is scared no more.
Ben Portnoy reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @bportnoy15.
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