The Dragon Lady's Journey

Let me introduce myself, I’m Tiffany Raikes MSN APRN FNP MLT-ASCP. If you don’t understand that alphabet soup, that’s okay. What it means is that I’m a Family Nurse Practitioner who has been learning and growing in medicine for the past 35+ years. I started in EMS with my local Rescue Squad as a teenager. I then joined the Navy Reserve as a Hospital Corpsman. I retired from the Navy Reserves after 28 years. In my medical career, I have been a Lab Tech, Patient Care Tech, Paramedic, RN (in multiple settings), and now a Nurse Practitioner specializing in Radiology and Vascular Medicine. 

My personal journey has been a struggle for over 50 years to pull myself out of a mire of mental and emotional yuck. This was caused by being born into a dysfunctional family fueled by generations of Alcohol, Drugs, and Mental Health Illnesses. My childhood was a jumbled mess of emotional, mental, sexual abuse, and neglect. The crazy part was I didn’t realize how bad it was until I truly started looking at my behaviors over five years ago. I actually started on the healing journey over 38 years ago when I addressed my own alcohol issues. It is crazy to realize that I spent over 30 years knowing something was wrong but not able to truly identify it. During that time, I gave birth and raised two amazing men, and fostered a third. I did my best with the tools that I had to give them a healthy upbringing.

My professional and personal journey has directed me toward a strong belief in Holistic Health. Holistic Health is a concept that combines Mind, Body, and Spirit as a singular state of being. To be truly healthy you must have a balance of the three aspects, if one is out of whack the others will follow shortly. The trick is figuring out which one needs balancing. This blog focuses on those three concepts. Part of my journey has been writing this daily blog, which while introducing these concepts to my readers, it has also helped me to continue my own process toward Holistic Health.

This is my first web-based blog post, I have been writing a text-based version for several years. The text-based version seemed to be going great until earlier this week when my beloved text app announced that it would be closing. The alternate is not currently usable for my text blog while maintaining my reader’s privacy and ease of use. Perhaps this is my Higher Powers way of kicking me in the arse, as I have been considering going to a more public version for a while now. Okay HP… I get it! Here we go.