Tricky Chart? Don't Go It Alone
Posted by Sara Fox Peterson in Health on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 10:00 AM
When cycles are irregular, long or absent, distingushing between the days that are definitely infertility and days that might be fertile is all about interpreting patterns of discharge. This is simple enough in theory, but because each of us is a unique individual, our patterns of fertility are unique as well and what indicates an infertile day for me may indicate a very fertile day for you.
Almost any type of dicharge can indicate infertility and any type can indicate fertility - it just depends on the overall patterns. To further complicate the situation for breastfeeding moms, patterns of infertility are often different during breastfeeding than at any other time in a woman’s life, often involve more or less constant discharge and may even be different from one breastfeeding experience to the next.
All of this makes it very hard to write concise, easy to apply instructions for figuring out a breastfeeding, perimenopausal or otherwise atypical chart.
NFP teachers on the other hand, as a part of their training, have spent many hours looking at, pondering and discussing many, many charts from many different women in all kinds of situations and most of us have gotten pretty good at this kind of thing. And we really want to help you figure out what is going on.
So find us! The information at the bottom of this post will, with a few phone calls or emails, put you in touch with someone who will make all the difference in the world in sorting out confusing charts. Yes, this is inconvenient. Yes, it can be uncomfortable or embarrassing to discuss this stuff with another person. But I cannot stress enough the importance of doing this to learn how to interpret your chart.
When you call one of the organizations listed below, the person who takes your call will first try to put you in touch with a local teacher who can review your chart with you. If there is no one in your area you also have the option of reviewing your chart with a trained teacher by telephone. So regardless of where you live you do have access to an NFP teacher. If you learned NFP through an organization that is not listed below, or if you are self-taught and aren’t sure which method you are using, that is OK, too; just explain your situation.
One final note on methods: Temperature can be useful for confirming that ovulation has occurred and that fertility is over with for a given cycle, but this is pretty much useless if a woman is looking at weeks or months or even years without ovulation. The same is true for most fertility monitoring devices.
So, in effect, all methods become mucus-only methods during times when cycles are very long or absent. This doesn’t usually present a problem and CCL, in particular, has done a lot in the past few years to make their version of the symptothermal method easier to use in these situations, but if you are working with a teacher who tells you that it is perfectly normal to need to abstain month after month after month you might want to contact a different teacher.
Mucus-only methods (Billings and Creighton) are not the same as the symptothermal method without temperatures and in some situations the symptothermal method can be unecessarily restrictive.
Resources:
- Billings Ovulation Method Association: email (boma-usa@msn.com) phone (651-699-8139)
- Fertility Care Center of Omaha (Creighton Model of NFP): email (fcco@popepaulvi.com) phone (402-392-0842)
- Couple to Couple League: email (ccli@ccli.org) phone (800-745-8252)
- Marquette University Institute for NFP: email (muinstnfp@mu.edu) phone (414-288-3854)
- Northwest Family Services email (service@nwfs.org) phone (503-546-6377)
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