Brendan Beauregard is running his first Boston Marathon to honor brother fighting colon cancer

Brendan Beauregard has never been a long distance runner, but that isn’t holding him back from running the Boston Marathon in honor of his older brother.

“He’s trying to fight for his life, trying to live on so it’s what I want to do and I just think about that whenever I hit a tough mile or a tough hill,”said Beauregard.

In September 2017, Patrick Beauregard, a corporal in the Marines and a newlywed, received the devastating diagnosis.

“I had severe stomach pains and that was it just out of nowhere. It wasn’t improving so the next day I went into the ER. They were almost a split-second away from sending me home. They finally decided to run a CT scan of my abdomen and that’s when they saw the tumor,” Patrick says.

Doctors told the 29-year-old he had stage four colon cancer. It had spread to his lungs.

“Complete shock. Utter disbelief,” said Patrick Beauregard. “You’re going through life, you’re young, you’re healthy. You think, no way. There’s no way.”

“He was really the picture of health, yet he was diagnosed with stage four disease and the reasons underlying that are unknown,” said Dr. Kimmie Ng, the director of the Young-Onset Colorectal Cancer Center.

What doctors do know is that there has been an alarming increase in the number of young adults diagnosed with colorectal cancer.

“The most frustrating thing is not knowing what caused this,” said Patrick. “I’m glad they’re doing all this research now and hopefully they find out the reason or reasons why there is such an uptick.”

Patrick has been through 33 rounds of chemotherapy. Next month he will start a clinical trial. Despite all the hardships and uncertainty, he’s still working, staying positive, and on a mission to increase awareness among young adults and medical professionals.

“The doctors and physicians, they also thought there’s no way I had cancer so I’m glad that now that there’s more awareness and I hope we break that stigma.” said Patrick.

But, more than anything, Brendan hopes to make his brother proud.

“He’s always been my hero and my best friend in life,” said Brendan.

posted Thursday March 28th