About

I’m Serra!

My family and I continue to strive for a natural living lifestyle. I am a RN with a love for herbal medicine, natural birth, homebirth and homesteading.

Welcome to Pioneer Health Ministry! This is not your typical blog or online shop. I am passionate about a natural living, natural birth, homebirth and homesteading lifestyle. As a registered nurse, I have seen and learned a lot about what true health entails. I have come to recognize how our medical and food systems are broken.

Here, I am sharing these lessons learned to all of you who are searching for answers. This has been a very long journey for myself and my family. I continue to learn new things every single day and just how to implement changes in our lives. This is not always an easy thing to do, and I hope that by creating Pioneer Health Ministry, that I can help others along this journey to better health.

man kissing pregnant woman on should wearing a pink dress

My Background

Many years ago, I entered the medical field as a medical assistant and quickly went into the United States Navy as a Hospital Corpsman. In the Navy I served on the labor and delivery and the medical/surgical units for several years. It was while in the Navy that I challenged the LVN board and obtained my LVN license in California. Once I was a civilian again, I was able to continue my education in the nursing field. I went to California State University of Sacramento (CSUS) and completed the LVN to RN program. Shortly after that I finished my RN to BSN program.

I’ve held a multitude of different jobs such as a nurse at the Folsom state prison, working in skilled and assisted nursing facilities, managing dementia facilities and hospice teams. Most recently I was working in hospitals for bedside patient care. I was working on different adult units such as cardiac, neurology, orthopedic, medical and surgical and some others.

Journey to Natural Living

During these different jobs, I was seeing the medical system up close and personal. I was noticing that there wasn’t much healing happening but Band-Aids being put in place and the revolving door kept moving. In my eyes, this was not how the medical system should operate.

I was also battling personal health issues, migraines and infertility. I was barely functioning a lot of the time and constantly in and out of the emergency room for the migraines. Doctors could not tell me why I was having fertility issues or the inability to lose weight. Finally, with no medical explanation or medication could be given to help, I turned to “alternative medicine” such as essential oils. From there it was one thing after another: changing the foods we ate, learning about fragrances and other chemicals in our everyday lives and herbal medicines.

This has been a long journey and I’m still not where I want to be, but it does take time. It’s not something that can happen overnight unfortunately. I am still making swaps here and there as I can.

I have a passion for educating others on how they can make small changes to further their journey into natural living.

Natural Living, Birth and Homesteading Advocate

As I write this, I am currently pregnant with our 5th child. We are planning on our 3rd homebirth, God willing. I am a huge advocate for homebirth, or natural birth in general. If you’re interested in my birth experiences, please see the video HERE. I discuss my 2 first hospital births and what led us to homebirth for the last 2 of our children thus far.

I also have a blog post on homebirth to help encourage and empower women. You can find that post HERE. Please comment on your experiences or hesitations on the blog post so I can get to know my readers.

Homesteading Journey

Right before 2020 lockdowns hit, I was already planning my first ever backyard garden. From there it was chickens and then goats for a short time. I have over a 2000 sq ft raised bed garden on our 0.36-acre home in Paradise, California. We are still raising chickens and one day would love to have more property for livestock again. However, I am learning all I can about food sustainability and preserving. Along with continuing my gardening skills for the day I can have a large-scale farm.

My YouTube channel shows my progress in learning to homestead over the past several years. Please follow me there and let me know what you think.

We also homeschool our children. I love bringing them alongside me as I’m learning so that they can grow up learning healthier lifestyle habits.