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Today, at 32, Cristina is married with two healthy children. Her journey through reproductive health challenges to motherhood illustrates how faith-aligned medical care can provide comprehensive answers that conventional approaches sometimes miss.

Years of Disrupted Cycles

“Since I was a teenager, I never had regular periods,” Cristina explains. “I was always like, you know, one month and then not for three months.”

At age 14 or 15, an OB-GYN diagnosed her with PCOS and prescribed birth control pills—a common but often incomplete solution. The pattern repeated for years: take birth control for six months, stop to see if her cycles had regulated, find they hadn’t, then restart the medication.

“I was basically just on birth control all the way till I was in my mid-20s, and then I just got tired of it,” she recalls.

As Cristina approached marriage in 2021 to a man she had met through Catholic Match during the pandemic, family planning became more important. “I wanted to make sure that everything was in place. I wanted to have children and not wait too long for that,” she says. “I didn’t even know if I could have children because I didn’t have any periods.”

When she sought help from conventional doctors, they again recommended birth control. “I was like, how is that going to translate? It has never worked for me in 10 years or so that I’ve been on it.”

Finding a Different Approach

Cristina began researching NaProTECHNOLOGY, a fertility approach that works with a woman’s natural cycle rather than suppressing it. This led her to My Catholic Doctor, where she connected with Dr. Sanchez-Speech.

The approach was immediately different. “She right away was like, ‘No, we’re not going to do birth control,'” Cristina recalls. Instead, the doctor ordered comprehensive lab work and even an MRI when she noticed Cristina’s prolactin levels were elevated.

“She wanted to have a holistic view of everything to see what was going on,” Cristina explains. This thorough evaluation revealed not just PCOS but also hypothyroidism and Hashimoto’s disease—conditions that had been missed in years of conventional treatment.

Dr. Sanchez-Speech prescribed levothyroxine for her thyroid condition and metformin with inositol for PCOS—treatments Cristina had wanted to try before but had been told wouldn’t work. The results were encouraging: “I started slowly having cycles again after many years of not having them. That was really exciting.”

Cristina and her husband also began using the Creighton Model FertilityCare System to better understand her cycles, working with an instructor through My Catholic Doctor.

The Journey to Motherhood

After marriage, Cristina and her husband began trying to conceive, knowing they were both in their late twenties and wanting to start a family. Unfortunately, she experienced two early miscarriages, each around five or six weeks of pregnancy.

Rather than dismissing these losses as common occurrences as some healthcare providers might, Dr. Sanchez-Speech responded with compassion and proactive care. “She was really like, ‘Okay, let’s see what’s going on, where we can help,'” Cristina recalls. “She took a bunch of labs and we were trying to adjust things and see what was going on.”

When Cristina became pregnant again, the doctor monitored her progesterone levels closely, suspecting that low levels might have contributed to her previous losses. With progesterone supplementation throughout the pregnancy, Cristina welcomed a healthy daughter, now almost two years old. She recently gave birth to her second child, a son, just over a month ago.

The Catholic Healthcare Difference

For Cristina, several aspects of Catholic healthcare made a meaningful difference in her experience. While she initially sought out a NaProTECHNOLOGY practitioner specifically, she found that shared values created a foundation of understanding.

“It was nice to have someone with the same kind of values who understood that I was not going to be on birth control, for example, when many others see no problem with it,” she explains.

She also appreciated the compassionate approach to pregnancy loss. “Some people could be dismissive of the early losses that I had, could be like, ‘Oh, you know, it happens. It’s no big deal.’ But she was very understanding that that’s just life,” Cristina says of her Catholic doctor’s response.

This contrasted with her experience elsewhere: “I did go with an OB for my second loss, and they were like, ‘Oh, you know, it happens. You’re gonna have a good pregnancy again, don’t worry.’ So they didn’t give too much thought to it.”

Dr. Sanchez-Speech took a more proactive approach, ordering comprehensive testing after Cristina’s second loss rather than waiting for a third, as is common in conventional practice. “She said, ‘We’re going to do the whole panel that they do for three now that you have two, because we don’t want to lose another little one,'” Cristina recalls.

A Message of Hope

Looking back on her journey, Cristina expresses gratitude for discovering Catholic healthcare and NaProTECHNOLOGY. “I’m really grateful and feel blessed that I was able to find this because I didn’t know it existed until I started looking,” she says.

She wishes more people knew about these options: “Sometimes people seem like, ‘Oh, you have trouble conceiving? It’s IVF or nothing.’ But there’s a lot to do, and there’s a lot of things to figure out.”

Cristina believes that if she had found this approach earlier in life, she might have avoided years of ineffective treatment. “I wish that I had found somebody when I was a teenager, when I got put on birth control, somebody who didn’t just patch it up,” she reflects.

Her message to others facing reproductive health challenges? “If you feel like your OB-GYN is not listening, there are other options or other doctors that could have different approaches that could be helpful.”

Today, as Cristina looks at her two children, she sees not just medical success but divine providence. As a Mexican woman married to an American man she met online during a pandemic, she marvels at the unlikely path that led to her family.

“I often think about how much of a coincidence everything is—though it’s not coincidence, but God’s plan,” she says. “God is always present, and He has a plan.”