About Andrea
Doctor, Patient, Business Owner, Author
A Type 1 diabetes diagnosis at age 15 marked the beginning of a health journey and a career serving those with diabetes.
Andrea’s Early Years
Andrea was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and raised as a true Southerner: direct, warm, observant, and trained early in the fine art of good manners under pressure. At fifteen, she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes—a life-altering interruption to adolescence that became the unlikely beginning of her life’s work. While other teenagers were navigating homework, friendships, and first freedoms, she was learning blood sugars, insulin, food math, and the humbling truth that the human body does not always respect one’s plans.
That diagnosis did more than change her daily life. It gave her a calling. Dr. Hayes decided to become the kind of physician she needed: scientifically rigorous, plainspoken, compassionate, and willing to sit with the relentless reality of chronic illness.
Education and Training
She attended Girls Preparatory School in Chattanooga, then Auburn University, where she studied pre-med and French and graduated with honors. She earned her medical degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, completed her Internal Medicine internship and residency at the University of Tennessee/Baptist Hospital in Nashville, and finished her fellowship in Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism at Vanderbilt University in 1997.
The Practice
At thirty-two, with the support of her father—a retired engineer with an entrepreneurial mind and unshakable work ethic—Andrea founded Hayes Endocrine and Diabetes Center in Nashville. What began as one physician with a vision grew into one of the busiest endocrinology practices in Middle Tennessee. Over the next twenty-five years, she cared for patients with diabetes, thyroid disease, obesity, hormonal disorders, and the many strange and stubborn ways the endocrine system can misbehave.
Her practice was built on high-volume, high-touch medicine: rigorous clinical care paired with frank, human counseling. She treated patients from across Tennessee and beyond, including many from medically underserved areas who had run out of options closer to home. Her work included clinical research trials, patient education, and a comprehensive weight-management program. She became known for translating complicated physiology into language patients could understand—often with humor, candor, and the occasional refusal to pretend peach cobbler counted as fruit.
Andrea’s career also gave her a front-row seat to the changing world of American medicine. She served as a speaker and consultant for pharmaceutical companies whose products affected diabetes care and related conditions, lecturing in both urban and rural settings. Those experiences deepened her understanding of how differently medicine is practiced depending on geography, resources, reimbursement, and corporate influence. She saw the promise of innovation, the pressure of industry, and the ethical tension that can arise when patient care and business interests collide.
The Entrepreneur
Beyond the exam room, Andrea worked as an expert witness in complex legal cases involving medical negligence, diabetic complications, caloric deprivation, and standards of care. The courtroom demanded another kind of medicine: clear thinking, intellectual honesty, and the ability to explain physiology to people who had never wanted to hear the word “metabolism” in the first place.
Running a large independent practice required more than medical expertise. Andrea employed nurse practitioners and staff, managed payroll, benefits, compliance, electronic medical records, insurance contracts, and the constant administrative weight that increasingly turned physicians into reluctant business managers. She also survived one of private practice’s most painful lessons: employee embezzlement. That experience forced her to become fluent in audits, oversight, policies, boundaries, and the uncomfortable fact that trust is not a business plan.
Following her father’s entrepreneurial example, Dr. Hayes also pursued real estate development and investment in Nashville. That parallel path—physician by day, entrepreneur by necessity—taught her as much about human nature as medicine did. She learned what people do under pressure, how systems reward and punish, and how quickly the life one has carefully built can become fragile.
Personal Medical Challenges
While caring for others with chronic disease, Andrea remained a patient herself. Over the years, type 1 diabetes was joined by hypothyroidism, multiple sclerosis, and trigeminal neuralgia. She also survived two life-threatening medical crises requiring life support—experiences that permanently changed her relationship to mortality, vulnerability, and the healthcare system she had spent her life serving. She knows what it means to be the physician in charge. She also knows what it means to be the body in the bed.
Beyond Medicine
Andrea now devotes her professional life to writing. Her work asks what illness teaches, what medicine gets right and wrong, and how meaning can survive even when the body, the business, or the life plan falls apart. Andrea writes from both sides of the exam table—with the eye of a physician, the honesty of a patient, and the wit of a woman who has seen enough to know that life is fragile, bodies are unreliable, and humor may be one of our most powerful survival tools.