Washington D.C., Jul 1, 2018 / 04:04 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- When Maggie* was in high school, she stayed after class to talk to ask a teacher what to do about a very personal concern she felt her physician was not taking seriously.
What she learned led to the discovery of a brain tumor, and treatment for the growth, which had been affecting the teen for years. The tools she needed to find and treat this growth came from an awareness of her fertility and natural cycles.
“It wasn’t so much that I was trying to avoid pregnancy or get pregnant – it’s that there was something legitimately wrong with my body,” Maggie told CNA.
By the time she was in her late teens, Maggie had noticed that her cycles had never regulated, and had no idea what that meant except that it wasn’t normal. While for the first years after a young woman begins to menstruate her cycles are of varying length and heaviness, they typically regulate within a few years. But several years after her own cycles began, Maggie was concerned that they never had settled into a normal pattern – in fact, she sometimes would have as few as one cycle a year. In addition, she also faced rounds of headaches.
One day, Maggie approached her college-level biology teacher, who also happened to be a practicing Catholic, looking for an explanation for her concerns and asking what to do. The teacher told her to ask her pediatrician, but also put her in touch with her church’s fertility instructor to see what could be done.
Maggie said her pediatrician immediately assumed that she was pregnant: an impossibility, because she was not sexually active. When the pregnancy tests came back negative, the doctor responded, “‘I don’t know what your problem is’ and brushed me off,” she recalled.
Meanwhile, the local parish’s natural family planning (NFP) instructor saw the teen’s distress and put her in touch with a Catholic fertility physician who could teach Maggie how to observe and chart the signs of her fertility.
Understanding Fertility
“A sign of health in a woman is a normal, regular cycle,” Dr. Lorna Cvetkovich, a gynecologist and obstetrician at Tepeyac Family Center in Fairfax, Va., explains. “We know what a normal cycle looks like,” she continued, “so at any time the parameters fall outside of those, then that’s a clue that maybe they’re not ovulating, they may have a luteal phase defect, they may have fibroids. It can show you all sorts of things.”
For women whose cycles fall within a normal range, normal bodily processes present themselves in a predictable pattern.
In the first part of a woman’s cycle, called the follicular phase, hormonal signals from the pituitary gland trigger the follicles (egg-containing structures within the ovaries) to prepare an egg for ovulation and to secrete estrogen into the woman’s body. This rise in estrogen levels triggers changes in the kind of fluid the cervix secretes, as well as thickening the uterine lining, making them more able to support the conception process.
After ovulation a woman’s body secretes progesterone, which causes a sharp increase in a woman’s basal, or resting, body temperature, as well as a preparation of the uterine lining for possible implantation. If a pregnancy occurs, the basal body temperature and hormone levels may continue to rise, whereas if pregnancy does not happen, the resulting dip in hormones triggers a drop in temperature, menstruation, and the beginning of a new cycle.
In a healthy woman who is not pregnant, this cycle will repeat every 21-35 days.
These changes can be observed by any woman, and can be used by married couples as a valid method to achieve or delay pregnancy, according to the teaching of the Catholic Church, which teaches that it is immoral to disrupt this natural cycle with the use of contraceptive pills, implants, barrier methods, or by having incomplete intercourse. Using these observations to help in the discernment of family size is known as natural family planning.
However, the same observations and data – commonly collected into charts for easier analysis – can be used to help diagnose gynecological issues such as ovarian cysts and growths in the uterus, called fibroids, as well as hormone deficiencies and other abnormalities affecting bodily functions. The information can also be essential in pinpointing issues surrounding pregnancy, such as the exact date of conception, infertility, and miscarriages.
This information is such a valuable insight into a patients health and symptoms – and an invaluable tool for doctors practicing reproductive medicine. “I just think it’s invaluable, and I don’t really know how people practice [gynecology] without having the charting,” said Cvetkovich. “There’s just so many uses, and it adds so much to your evaluation of the patient.”
Cycles and Diagnosis
Disorders in other bodily systems – such as the endocrine system – can manifest in a woman’s menstrual cycle and her chart. “Thyroid plays a role in almost every function of the body, so it may show up as a sign in the cycle,” explained Cvetkovich.
For Christine, charting her bodily signs helped her to catch an issue with her thyroid that might otherwise have been missed. After charting for four years, she started noticing that some months there was no ovulation that could be detected by temperature or with chemical tests for the hormones that trigger ovulation.
“I had what looked like a really long cycle, and then eventually, what to the uninformed observer would look to be a light period. But because I knew I hadn’t peaked, I was able to identify it as estrogen breakthrough bleeding and not a real cycle,” she explained.
“It seemed like my body was trying to ovulate, and not really getting there.”
She approached her doctor, explaining she was not ovulating and that she would like to find the cause for something that was out of the ordinary. The doctor then ordered comprehensive blood tests, and found that some of her thyroid-stimulating hormone levels were elevated beyond normal – in fact, her levels were twice as high s they had been a year ago.
After receiving treatment, her cycles returned to their normal pattern.
“I didn’t have a lot of signs or symptoms of hypothyroidism, aside from missing ovulation,” Christine noted, saying she wouldn’t have picked up on the disorder had she not been charting. “ I wouldn’t have realized there was an issue,” Christine she added, reflecting on the fact that she probably would not have even received the treatment she needed.
“Whenever I’m sharing my experience with NFP with somebody, I’m always quick to point out not only all of the standard benefits, but that it enabled me to know my body and know there’s a problem that so many people wouldn’t be aware of.”
How Fertility Awareness Helped to Find a Tumor
After a local NFP instructor put Maggie in touch with physicians familiar with fertility awareness, she became more aware of what was going on in her own body. She learned to observe her basal body temperature and cervical fluid signs – and noticed that while sometimes she had a more typical menstrual cycle and her chart showed the usual peaks and dips of a healthy young woman, at other times her cycle was irregular and her temperature was more elevated.
Even though she was not sexually active, “my body was acting like it was pregnant,” Maggie said. The doctors at the Catholic fertility clinic sent Maggie out for blood work, which showed a high level of prolactin – a hormone present during pregnancy and breastfeeding. She took this information back to her pediatrician, and then to an endocrinologist, who ordered an MRI scan of her brain.
“There was a tumor pressing into my pituitary, pressing into my frontal cortex,” Maggie explained.
“When I first heard the word ‘tumor’ I freaked out,” she related, but thankfully, “it wasn’t cancerous,” but a benign growth which explained both her irregular cycles and some of her headaches.
Maggie received the treatment she needed to shrink the tumor, and told CNA that “things are pretty much normal now.” While the tumor is still there – “it’ll never really go away, unless I get surgery,” she related; “what’s happened at this point is that it’s checked.”
While since receiving treatment she has no need to monitor as rigorously all of her signs and symptoms, knowledge of her fertility and its signs has given Maggie tools she can use use if the tumor starts to grow again.
“I have this, and I know these are indicators to know [if] something is wrong with my prolactin.”
Fertility – ‘A Public Health Issue’
Cvetkovich suggested this level of awareness can be useful for any woman looking to take care of their health.
“I think that anytime you put someone more in tune with your body, they’re just going to know that things are wrong earlier. I think that’s what it’s all about, knowing what’s normal for you, and being in tune with it.”
She commented that many of her fellow physicians, as well as the general public, have grown accustomed to relying on hormonal contraceptives to address disorders, a practice she said “makes people very distant from their bodies and from their cycles.”
“We’ve lost the idea that having a normal monthly cycle is health – that’s normal. Being fertile is normal. I think that’s where NFP brings us back to, really: to reality.”
Maggie agrees, saying that some of her initial struggle in receiving treatment was a result of people “missing the point that fertility isn’t sort of an accessory to being a human woman – it’s an integral part of how our bodies work.” Awareness of how women’s bodies work, and how to tell when they’re not working correctly, is important for everyone.
“It’s a public health issue.”
*Name has been changed to protect privacy.
This article was originally published July 31, 2015.
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I’m sorry but the bishops don’t get to weigh in on our immigration crisis because they all share in the guilt of encouraging people to break the law by entering the USA illegally. And, in addition to that, the bishops profitted handsomely by this conspiracy to abet foreigners’ breaking our laws.
I’d suggest that Bishop Broglio try leaving the USA or entering any other country without a passport i.e. illegally and see what the consequences are.
Excellent point, Diogenes.
The bishops have blood on their hands. They have advocated for the illegal migration of millions into this country, which directly resulted in the deaths of thousands upon thousands of Americans due to drug overdoses, plus the sex trafficking of women and children.
Archbishop Broglio and his USCCB henchmen are complicit. It’s just one part of the legacy of Bergoglio.
(Also see: Rupnik, et al.)
I don’t believe the bishops see all sides of the border security issue, especially the tragic effects it’s had on Mexican communities plagued by cartel violence & extortion .Human smuggling just strengthens the cartels through profits & enables turf wars.
On the other hand, some who only see enforcing immigration law as a good in itself can miss the human suffering of those who are taken away from their work in our hotels, landscaping companies, & poultry processing plants. Most of these are otherwise decent folk who are trying to support their families back home & doing jobs many US citizens don’t want.
mrscracker, I do see your point about people wanting to come here to seek jobs and support their families. At the same time, how many of these people are holding jobs that are ‘off-the-books’ and are being paid slave wages? How many in the agriculture industry are picking crops and living in trailers moving from place to place as the seasons change- a totally peripatetic existence? How many jobs come with Workman’s Comp and health insurance? How many have fraudulently obtained drivers licenses and Social Security cards and then illegally vote in our elections as instructed by the DNC?
Let me tell you about someone I counseled in my Psychology practice a few years back. He came to the USA illegally and had to pay a huge sum of money to the cartel that guaranteed his safe passage. At first he was sending a good deal of the money he earned back to Mexico to support the wife and three children he left there. After he was here for a time, he began feeling lonely and he met an Hispanic woman who I guess sensed that he was a hard working guy and a good catch. She got pregnant. Now they are living together and the money he used to send back home stopped because few salaries can support two families. My guess is that his wife and three children are even more destitute than before, the children will be forgotten and will remain fatherless for their lives. Multiply this scenario hundreds of thousands of times. Illegal immigration is not only a crime; in my book it is a sin.
Yes, it certainly creates all kinds of opportunities for abuse & exploitation. That’s why I think we should try to normalize the immigration/work visa status for folks who are employed in our communities & have maintained clean records. It would also allow them to go home & visit their families on a regular basis instead of being stuck here & taking up with new partners.
The real criminals need to be deported ASAP but decent workers are an asset we shouldn’t take for granted. We’ll be competing soon with other nations for workers as our population ages.
I worked for years & years with no health insurance or benefits. Lots of people here live in trailers, not just Hispanic migrants. Agricultural workers are generally legal. I’ve heard that fewer Mexicans want those kinds of jobs these days. Mexico’s no longer a 3rd World nation but there are still pockets of poverty.
I think the bishops see the human suffering without balancing that with the terrible price Mexico pays for our enabling the cartels. The border needs to be secured & the smuggling ended as much as possible. But we can work with people already in the workforce & not try to channel Inspector Javert. There should be a legal, humane & reasonable solution.
Bishops have been paid for “resettlement”.
I am a CPA, if I have any interest in a potential audit client, I may not opine on their financial statements. Why? Because my independence is impaired.
Same here.
Every illegal has a criminal history.
There is a bizarre notion among invasion advocates that somehow if somebody enters illegally, that “laying low” exonerates, excuses or mitigates their illegal entry. I assure you that if you commit tax fraud, the IRS will not defer prosecution simply because you haven’t followed up your initial evasion with another.
This is CCC 2241.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 2241:
The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able,
(We are no longer able to do so. We are “broke”. There are cultural and economic reasons that impair our ability to receive more-especially millions-even if they all entered legally)
to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood
(Seeking our welfare state, and the drive by certain industries to maintain subpar wages is not security or means of livelihood)
which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him.
(The operative word here is guest. Guests are respectful of their host, the host’s abode, the host’s needs and do not attempt to become squatters)
Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption.
(NOTHING is ever said about the responsibilities of the immigrants or those that violate our sovereignty or their duties)
Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.
(Rioting and insisting on open borders, flying foreign flags and running for office and prioritizing the needs of one’s own tribe, ethnicity, religion or country of origin is NOT respecting with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, obedience to its laws or the assistance with carrying civic burdens.) Ilhan Omar should simply not be in any position of authority.
Bishops seem to have forgotten the citizens of this country have rights and reasonable expectations of a government in protecting their rights as well-and they never seem to worry about our concerns in this regard.
I think Archbishop Broglio may be missing important actions of ICE. Incited by Trump’s MAGA insanity, and the complicit Sec. Noem, and Border Czar Homan, having caused uprisings nationwide. What was ICE’s charter? I heard that the order was to seek out criminals, cartels like MS13.
The criminal actions this week by ICE “officers” handcuffing Senator Alex Padilla and New York Comptroller Brad Lander proved that Trump, again, is out of control.
This week, the raids resumed on farms, meat processors, restaurants, and hotels. I have asked some GOP leaders, Senator majority leader, John Barrasso, GOP Whip and Bill Cassidy, why they remain silent. No response. Seems like nothing has changed.
Dear Pitchfork. I agree with most of your hypotheses. As a Catholic, I most always, favor the decisions of the Hierarchy. I try to refrain from disparaging them. The challenged Church needs the help of its faithful.
No question, migration and the asylum overload are the main causes of criminals entering the country. The text makes no mention of ICE and its mission. ICE appears to be thrust onto the scene. They show little compassion even to the migrants working in the fields. There is strong evidence that Trump’s ICE minions have been given free range. Noem and Homan are using a “scorched earth, slash-and=burn methods. Ex: just this week, Senator Alex Padilla and NYC Comptroller Brad Landon were handcuffed and released. ICE seems to be in every city, even my little city of Kingston, NY. I asked my GOP congressional reps “did Congress appropriate taxpayer money to fund ICE?” No reply. I am amazed that my GOP US reps have remained silent on many issues facing the nation.
Criminal and ruthless cartels, Tren de Aragua and MS13 are driving many of the migrants from their countries. They are in the US.
There have been forceful statements from the church.
Thank you
Mr Morgan, no one comes to our border without having paid off the cartels. And not a few migrants remain in debt to them and are extorted into drug smuggling. It’s a really ugly revolving door that we have cooperated with by not securing the border.
I feel sorry for hardworking migrants who are just here to support their parents and families but the bad ones need to go. Hopefully we can fix our system to reward the good workers and make future entry safe and legal.