When Hubby and I married, nearly 11 years ago, we took the NFP class offered through our parish. It was the Sympto-Thermal Method. It ended up not being the best fit for us, but it was the beginning of exploring how my fertility worked (or didn't).
I was listening to
Jennifer Fulwiler speak a couple weeks ago and she said something I've said myself,
the Catholic Church is the owner's manual to being human. Nowhere has this been more true in my personal life than Natural Family Planning. Especially since finding
Creighton. While I won't claim to being the best of pupils and an emotional residual of infertility is that I'm a little crabby and resist doing all the observations
because my frustration says what's the point, I do see the help and value of it in my life.
Since puberty, I've really struggled with my weight.
Really struggled. While I eat my feelings on occasion, diet and exercise has never been able to produce proportionate results on my frame. During certain times in my cycle, I struggled with keeping a handle on my emotions....which is a really nice way of saying I was a rage-a-holic at the end of each cycle. Sequestering myself was really all I could do to keep the peace while I felt like that.
In the last few years, I've felt tired
all the time. All of it. I thought perhaps it was having two toddlers at once, then maybe depression over losing one of them.
So there I was, January 2014, out of control weight, enraged and exhausted. Then, a friend introduced me to Creighton Model Natural Family Planning. The benefit of Creighton was advertised as being able to diagnose and treat reproductive health problems. A big selling point when doctors hadn't been able to give me any answers over the years of infertility.
Five months into the process, after charting, many, many blood draws and driving my own blood serum two hours away for analysis, the numbers came back. My progesterone was
dangerously low. Very bad. Like possibly contributing to the ectopic rupture that nearly killed me and the growth delay Sweet Pea had in utero bad.
The solution was less than palatable, but effective. Four subcutaneous injections each month timed to provide my body with what it should have been doing on its own. All to create a normal, balanced cycle.
All those years of cycling, and I finally experienced a release from the rage, less pain and a generally improved quality of life. That was more than 20 years of suffering, soothed by scientists faithful to the teachings of the Catholic Church and unwilling to take a band-aid approach to a real problem.
Because it's not about forcing teachings onto women; it's about honoring our own unique chemistry and fighting for answers when that chemistry is unbalanced. It's about loving us enough to know our reproductive system is not a disease, but a part of what makes us uniquely woman. It's about treasuring us enough to work with our bodies, not against them. It's about giving us answers, solutions, and support. It's an owner's manual for how we work, and help when things don't.
Now, we still haven't conceived, even after many months of injections. But here's the thing, that may or may not ever happen again. Part of my Lent is making peace with that. Still, those injections are slowly healing me. Now, exercise does show results where even the most disciplined routines showed no progress before. I still have to work harder than the average person, but working hard now does
something, which is new for me. My emotional health is slowly being restored as well. With the hormone support I receive via injection, I am no longer a slave to the rage that used to overtake me. Sure, sometimes I'm crabby, but it's a shadow of what once was.
The pain of menstruation was no small thing for me. There are still months where I might have some discomfort, but for the most part, that's unusual now. From debilitating all the time to uncomfortable occasionally is a huge leap, friends. Huge.
There's also a piece we may never fully know how it's affected me. My previous hormone balance put me at great risk of breast cancer. Every month, my body was bathed in hormones that would support the growth of cancerous cells, with no balance of those that were hostile to them. I was a petri dish just waiting for the opportunity to grow cancer. Now, a proper balance of hormones makes me a less promising host. Maybe someday I'll get cancer. I know I'll be more vigilant about it than I might have been otherwise. But, maybe I'll have years longer before the cancer than I would have otherwise. Maybe it will be less aggressive, maybe it won't happen at all. It's not something we can measure and know exactly what this new balanced level of hormones is doing for me. But, it's giving me better odds, and I'm in favor of that.
All of this, all of these health benefits because I wanted our family to be blessed with more children, so we sought answers to why it wasn't happening. That right there is a blessing in our openness to life; my improving health.
This improved health is based in bio-identical hormones that add nothing toxic or synthetic to my body. It creates order in what was the chaos of my infertility. Creighton sometimes feels like I'm part of a science experiment with the research they collect, but really, at the heart of it, nothing speaks more truly of love for woman, respect for woman than the honoring of her body and its natural processes.
Nothing has shown me quite so personally the love the Church has for me, the beauty of creation and the wonder of how I am made than the researchers, faithful to the teachings of the Church, who have worked to heal me. They have worked in cooperation with God, using science to restore, build up and heal women. I am so grateful to be one of the women benefiting from this work.
If you're suffering from severe mood swings, infertility, or fertility that you would like a better insight into (and options that also support the health and well-being of our environment), I urge you to prayerfully consider Natural Family Planning, especially the Creighton Model. I didn't know there was a solution to the pain of my cycles and the rage of my pre-menstrual phase for so, so long, until a friend had the courage to hand me a book about Creighton. There is help, there is healing, there is a way to work with the beauty and magnificence of your body while you seek to limit or increase your family to the place where God is calling you.
