My name is Brian Addington. I'm a 46-year-old daddy, father of three beautiful kids. Johnny's five, Ellie's seven, and Grace is 10. I'm a CFP, which is a Certified Financial Planner, and I have a wonderful team and we run a investment management and financial planning practice here at First Republic Bank in San Francisco.
I live in Mill Valley, which is in Marin County, and I'm from northern California. I'm from a very rural, small town, little town called Oroville. I was 39 years old and I wasn't feeling well, it turns out likely unrelated to prostate cancer, but I just wasn't feeling my best. I was feeling fatigued and I was having headaches. And so I had gone to the doctor and through a series of labs and testing and different diagnosis, including potential migraines and things like that, I ended up with an endocrinologist who was exploring hormonal issues.
And through that process, they discovered that my testosterone level was relatively low for someone my age. And so we had talked about the idea of some replacement therapy. And fortunately, as part of their discovery process, they do a lab for PSA because they want to be aware of that. And also, my father was a prostate cancer survivor. And so when they did the PSA, it came back at two, which relatively elevated for a 39-year-old man.
And so just to be cautious, the endocrinologist referred me to a urologist, and I went to the urologist and he looked at my exams, but he picked up on the fact that being a little vain I was taking Propecia and Propecia is finasteride, and Finasteride is something they prescribed him, as you may all know, and the side effect was hair growth. So I was taking Propecia, and it turns out that Propecia suppresses your PSA. So my PSA of two, that he was somewhat concerned about was something more like PSA four, is what the way he explained it. And so he took the next step of having me take a 4K score test, which I did. And I became more nervous during this period of time, and particularly when the 4K score test came back and suggested I had a high likelihood of advanced or aggressive prostate cancer.
And so that really got me worried and my family worried. I was married with two young children at the time. And so that took me into being referred to UCSF. And we had met with several doctors and ultimately met with Dr. Peter Carroll, who was extremely helpful and really calmed me down a bit. But I then had a biopsy, I think I might have... In fact, we did a prostate MRI to start with, which was not pleasant. And that came back with more information that led to the biopsy. And the biopsy came back and essentially confirmed that I had prostate cancer. And as I recall, half of the cores were positive. And as I recall it was Gleason 3+4.
And then I can't remember which of the labs mentioned that the 3+4 was likely still in the capsule and that it had reached the capsule but hadn't gone through the capsule as I recall. And there was this word, tertiary, more advanced disease. So it was a scary discovery. And part of my story today when people are asking me about that process is probably one of the most significant things that I experience. And I now say I have an entirely new appreciation for mental health. And so what I started to feel was a serious sense of anxiety physically.
I went to the doctor and I was sharing with them how I was feeling, and they mentioned the word anxiety, and I thought, no, no, this is real. Anxiety to me, before this, meant sort of butterflies before a big meeting or an important exam, and I was feeling very, this is a physical manifestation. So that period of time learning that I had cancer, and by the way, that same week I learned that we were having our third child, Johnny, who's now five years old. And so it was a lot of information. There was a lot going on, and it was a really scary time in my life to say the least. The anxiety, the physical manifestations of anxiety was making sleep almost impossible. I wasn't sleeping well, I was worried a lot, and I was having headaches, just not feeling well, just generally not well.
And of course I can't help myself, but to get on the internet and start Googling around with cancer and just trying to understand what it was that I was facing. And I did come across some really wonderful information that was somewhat helpful, but not being a medical professional, I didn't have the vocabulary and the way to synthesize that information. And I now understand how dynamic and complicated it can be, where not all patients with the same Gleason score are necessarily in the same boat. It's much more complicated than that.
So I did come across some information that was helpful, that helped me calm down a bit. I found some information, from others survivors and people telling their stories, most of it was helpful and some of it wasn't, frankly, because I didn't have the right vocabulary to understand what somebody who also didn't understand what they were going through was sharing. And the mortality statistics that I picked up on from different other survivors was really not helpful to me. I was a 39-year-old with prostate cancer, and what I discovered was that a lot of young men who get prostate cancer oftentimes aren't diagnosed until it's really metastatic. So I was getting some scary information.
Dr. Carroll was incredibly patient and spent time with me and my wife kind of helping us understand and made me feel really positive about where I was in my own prostate cancer journey. And having had the opportunity to be treated with surgery, and we did investigate other options, but ultimately by talking to friends and family and other people in medicine, it seemed to me like the right answer was to try to get the cancer out of my body. And so we chose to have the radical robotic prostatectomy with Dr. Carroll at UCSF.
From the point of getting in front of the urologist where we sort of realized that my PSA was elevated until I was sitting in front of Dr. Carroll and admitting myself to the hospital to have surgery. I feel like that was a couple of months. It was weeks, it was not more than a couple of months, so it happened relatively fast, thankfully. I feel so blessed, number one, that I was in front of wonderful physicians, and I live in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I mentioned the new appreciation for mental health, and when I learned that, I describe it as getting into this really dark rabbit hole where I was future tripping to say the least, and worried about my family and my kids who I'm so crazy about. And it was a very dark, scary time. It took a lot of effort and therapy through the process to get to gratitude. And what I ultimately had to do by the grace of God, was get to this point where I'm saying, thank God they found it. And thank God I'm in California in the San Francisco Bay Area and have physicians like Dr. Carroll and Dr. Felix Fang, and these men and women who are brilliant and capable, and the medical technology and just the whole thing. I'm just very sad that there are, I don't know, thousands, millions of young men around the world who don't have access to this information and resources that I blessed to have. And so gratitude was the most important piece of the puzzle for me to get to this place where today...
So I had a radical prostatectomy that seemingly went well. I came out of that with mostly good news that felt like we had gotten all of the cancer out. There was some, I guess you'd say biopsies or they removed of different other areas. I can't say the word right now. And that all came out negative.
Seminal vesicles. Sorry. Thank you. Yeah. So in the surgery, they removed the lymph nodes and seminal vesicles, which were negative. And Dr. Carroll, by the grace of God was of successful at preserving the nerves and had done some things so that as a young man, I was still able to get an erection and there was no guarantees, that was a scary thing. But urinary incontinence and erectile dysfunction was a thing on my mind, to say the least. And so I came out of that feeling like I was very fortunate, to say the least.
So that was great. I did have some significant leakage early in the process, and it was something that I had to work on, and which I did. There's exercises and things that you can do, but I also found just randomly here locally, I discovered this doctor's office. I think that it was a dermatologist or plastic surgery or something that a lot of ladies, some friends of mine had told me about. And they have this chair, this electric chair where you sit down on it much like this, and it does this electric shock that's equivalent to thousands of Kegels. And I went through a series of that. And today, I don't need to wear a pad. I don't have many accidents, but if you get me laughing really hard and I've got a full bladder, the things could happen, but it's worth it. I'm alive and I like to laugh. But when I feel the urge to go to the bathroom, I just go, and that's okay.
So Dr. Carroll, we had the surgery. Everything seemed to go well. Months later, I continued to be very vigilant on following up with my labs, and I had undetectable PSA for approximately a year, a little over a year. And then I had the really frightening experience of having a slight increase in my PSA show up from a very sensitive test at UCSF as I understand it. So it was very minor and minuscule, to say the least, but boy did that scare me. Again, thankfully I had gone through a process, and so I was able to handle the information much better this time. And I had met and was able to get in front of and meet again with Felix Fang. And so I got that appointment relatively quickly, surprisingly quickly, and we got in. That anxiety was creeping up again, the mental health was revisiting me, I felt it.
And I sat in that room with Felix, and he was incredibly patient, not in a hurry, and we just talked and he made me feel incredibly better. I was in such great hands, it was so obvious. He empathized, he understood kind of what I was feeling, and we are of similar ages. And so I think he could see a little bit of what I was going through or could understand it with young children. And I just felt like I was in the right place, and Felix was the right person at the right place to just really give me that ease and confidence that we were going to do whatever it takes, and that there is a lot of information out there and a lot of technology, and this is a place that there's getting a lot of attention. And I know that Felix is part of that.
And so I just felt incredibly blessed to be cared for and by Felix. So just the relationship with Felix was medicine for me, of the most important, just keeping me well physically, mentally, emotionally. It was just a great time. So I spent some time with him. We walked through all of the different options and the approaches and what might we do, and I just felt really comfortable and blessed to just put myself in Felix's hands. And so he designed, came up with my protocol, I guess, and I started, I guess you would call it salvage radiation, so sort of after. And that was a couple of years ago, I guess it was maybe two or three years ago now. And that went well. It was a daily morning routine at UCSF here in San Francisco. I live in Marin County. I would drive in into UCSF, kind of developed a real nice rhythm and process, do my radiation, and then go into the office here in the financial district of San Francisco.
And I got to meet a lot of the staff, and I developed these friendships that, you kind of meet people and other patients and the staffing. Anyways, it became just kind of part of the process. And it was easy. And you wouldn't sign up for that necessarily but I was able to get through it and it went well. So we finished that, and sometime later my PSA again went to undetectable. I go back and get it checked every few months, and it's continued to stay undetectable, and I'm very thankful for that.
Today a lot has changed over the last, now six plus years since my initial diagnosis. My Johnny's five, Ellie's seven, Grace is 10. I have a lot of fun. I'm crazy about my kids. I'm very involved. And one of the things that occurred through this process, and that has certainly nothing to do with prostate cancer, but just life sometimes it's tough being an adult and a lot of pressures and a lot of changes going on in the world and through this pandemic. And it took a toll on my family and my relationship ended in divorce.
So I was divorced last year and we share custody of our children 50/50. And so it's working. The kids seem to be doing well. And so yeah, we're enjoying the time that we have together and doing the best we can. I was just sharing with you earlier that I got to be in the Nutcracker with my two daughters this last during Christmastime. And I mentioned that just because I think that being diagnosed with cancer and having to go through a very painful process, it's hard to understand how it could potentially help you appreciate life and the things that you have.
And I'd like to think that through a very difficult process and difficult time in my life, that there are some positive things that came out of that. And so knowing when I was asked, "Hey, would you be willing to voluntarily be in the performance as the party dad in the party scene?" I didn't hesitate. I don't know that I would've hesitated. I would've hesitated or not prior to all this, but I know that those opportunities now are here and it's time to enjoy them and be part of that process, part of life with my daughters, so it was a great time. And I also, I would share that through this journey, I met some really incredible people. Dr. Fang, who's who I just think of as a dear friend. I also think of him as the person who's saved my life in many ways. And so I wouldn't have had that relationship.
And I value relationships today. I'd like to think that I value them before, but I certainly appreciate them in a new way. And I've also, through these years, have shared my story with a lot of colleagues and friends and people in my community. When it's appropriate and it comes up, I do share my story about being a cancer survivor, and I like to take the opportunity to talk about the mental health part of that. And being a young man who had that real experience, that changed my understanding of what anxiety is. And I like to share how I was able to ask for help and meet with physicians who were able to help me navigate that. And through therapy and medicine, I was able to reclaim my life so that I could navigate the journey better, less painfully. And so I do like to share my story and make myself available to other men who are going through different issues.
And probably the biggest blessing of this whole process is when a friend or a friend of a friend, I will occasionally get a phone call about someone that they love being recently diagnosed with prostate cancer or having some mental health challenges in any way. And I, without hesitation, invite them to let me give them a call or have them call me and come alongside them. And I think it's incredibly helpful to this interaction, this human interaction with other people who have gone through something similar who can empathize and listen. And sometimes you just need to cry it out. And sometimes you don't necessarily need to present a solution or just to be there with them just to say, "Hey, here's my story. This is what happened with me. And I don't know what it's like for you right now", but just to be there with them and be a resource, and it's a blessing.