In the fall of 2022, Brad Bakken felt something wasn’t right. He found himself getting tired more easily, and he couldn’t finish his normal cardio workouts in the morning.

“At first I thought it was maybe just old age or an occasional bad morning,” said Brad, a Bell Investments wealth advisor in Wahpeton, N.D. “But when it kept happening, I decided I needed to get it checked out.”

He scheduled a doctor’s appointment to get his bloodwork checked, which led to more tests and eventually a referral to the Roger Maris Cancer Center in Fargo. There, he was diagnosed with mantle cell lymphoma, a rare type of cancer that required several months of hospital stays, chemotherapy, a stem cell transplant and other aspects of a difficult recovery.

Now, three years later, Brad is in remission and able to look back on a difficult period with a new perspective on life and serving his clients.

Treatment and Recovery

Following his diagnosis, Brad’s treatment was lengthy and filled with countless trips between Wahpeton and Fargo. For the first three months, he drove nearly 60 miles to Fargo and then back home two times per week for chemotherapy. For the next three months, he drove up to Fargo every Monday morning and stayed in the hospital until Wednesday.

After the initial chemotherapy treatment, Brad received a stem cell transplant followed by a round of high-dose chemotherapy.

“That was the most difficult part of the process,” he said. “I just felt really awful after that.”

For the next 10 days, Brad was confined to an isolation wing of the hospital to protect his immune system. On June 4, 2023, he was officially discharged from the hospital, with all the nurses and hospital staff gathering to cheer as he rang a celebratory bell.

“It was a cool thing, like crossing a finish line in a way,” Brad said.

Life still wasn’t back to normal, however. The hospital required him to be within 45 minutes travel distance for two weeks, which meant he couldn’t go home to Wahpeton. Those days were spent in isolation with his wife and dog in a hotel room until he was allowed to return home, though he still needed to stay isolated as his immune system recovered.

Through it all, Brad says the support he received from his family, friends and colleagues at Bell was a huge boost.

“Amy (Cookman) and Kelly (Hubrig) took care of my clients during that time,” he said. “There’s no way for me to repay them for the workload they carried while I was dealing with this.”

Positivity and Resilience

Prior to 2022, Brad rarely got sick and never missed a day of work due to illness, he said. So, his diagnosis came as a shock, impacting his mental outlook as much as it did his physical health.

“Your head can go to some pretty dark places,” he said. “But I tried to keep things as positive as I could. I knew a lot of people had much worse things going on in their lives than I did, and so I never pitied myself. I just tried to take it one day at a time.”

That approach wasn’t surprising to those who know Brad well. For Craig Samuelson, program manager of Bell Investments and Brad’s friend and colleague of nearly 25 years, Brad embodies resilience and positivity. “Those two things make Brad who he is, and were at the heart of how he overcame his health challenge,” Craig said.

As Brad’s health has returned to normal, he still carries that outlook in both his personal and professional life.

“As financial advisors, we deal as much in human compassion as anything,” he said. “Clients call when they’re concerned or don’t understand what’s going on, and it’s my job to help them control what they can control. Just like I couldn’t control what illness I got or how I felt after the treatments, we can’t control what happens in the world around us. So, we take it one day at a time and focus on our expected long-term outcome.”

Three years after first noticing his fatigue during his workouts, Brad is back to exercising again. Although doctors told him he can’t run anymore, he now plays racquetball a few times per week and has recently started swimming.

“There’s no restrictions on any of those activities at all, and I’m thankful for that,” Brad said. “I’m thankful for a lot of things.”

This article appeared in the Q4 2025 issue of the Bell Wealth newsletter.