Why I started this

My grandfather died of prostate cancer, and my other grandfather died of liver cancer. Neither one of them made it to 70.

When my dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer, he got tested and found out he carried a BRCA mutation, so he asked me to get tested too. I remember thinking it was mostly a formality, something we'd do and then move on from. It wasn't. I came back positive.

My dad never really made any major lifestyle changes after that, and a few years later he died of complications from brain cancer, still short of 70 himself. Knowing what he was up against didn't end up being enough on its own, and that's stuck with me more than almost anything else.

I have three kids now, and I want to do everything I can to be here for them for as long as possible. That means actually doing something with what I know instead of just knowing it: staying on top of screenings, making real changes to how I live, and not just filing the test result away. None of it has come easy, and honestly, my own brother still won't get tested. I understand that more than I'd like to, since some things feel easier not to know. But I'd rather spend the next twenty years actually doing something about this than find out too late that I didn't.

I'm not perfect at any of this myself. My weight goes up and down, I have a drink now and then, and some years the screenings and checkups slip further down the list than they should. What keeps me honest is having other people around who are actually dealing with the same thing, which turns out to be exactly the kind of accountability I couldn't find anywhere else.

That's the whole reason BRCA Bros exists. Every BRCA community I came across was mostly women, which makes sense, since they're the ones who've been organizing around this for decades. But I couldn't find anywhere for men to push each other to actually follow through, especially not somewhere that wasn't run out of a hospital or cancer center. So I built one myself.