«Respectfully, the 15 year life expectancy numbers are not a one size fits all deal for everyone with prostate cancer.»

That's a good reminder. Almost all studies use "overall survival" (OS) as their measure, since it's hard to tell exactly what eventually kills someone. I expect that OS understates actual life expectancy for younger people, and overstates it for older ones (e.g. if you're already 95, you're probably not going to make 110 regardless of how your prostate cancer progresses, but please prove me wrong!).

However, the biggest issue is that all studies are backwards looking, often using data that they started collecting 10–20 years ago (even if the study came out recently), and so much has changed in Prostate Cancer treatments and best-practices in the last 5–6 years that perhaps all of the numbers are inapplicable now. We're the new sample population, and new studies like IRONMAN will some day tell us what's happening to us today.

I have no regrets on my choice as after a year and three months my PSA is still undetectable. I was 73 he is 83 you are 69. Age makes a huge difference in one's outlook. If I get 15 years, it puts me at 89. My sister works in a nursing home and tells me all the time you don't want to go to one. That one core out of the four they found in my 7mm lesion made me do something about it. If it had only been 3 -4's I would have just watched as the MRI showed it was not near the capsule. My PDA had varied over the last five years from 2.3 to 2.9 and I had a 2.9 at year three before. The only thing that alerted me was a very low free PSA of 15 which started my investigation.