Chemo Duck [home] The mission of Gabe's Chemo Duck program is to use education and empowerment
to support positive healing in lives touched by cancer and create a unified
voice to make understanding the causes of cancer a national priority.

The vision of Chemo Duck is to live in a world without cancer.


Chemo Duck is here to help

By: Bruce Smith
Associated Press

CHARLESTON, S.C. - Gabe Sipos dealt with doctors, pain and scary equipment when diagnosed with cancer more than four years ago just shy of his first birthday. But the ordeal was made easier with Chemo Duck - a yellow stuffed duck complete with hospital scrubs, a head bandanna and a tiny IV line for chemotherapy.

The plush duck also helped Gabe's mother, Lu, who came up with the idea, learn to deal with the deadly disease.

Now, with the help of a Charleston-based foundation, the mother from Nashville, Tenn., hopes to get one of the ducks to every young child in America battling cancer.

"As a parent I was lost and didn't know what my role was in his treatment," Ms. Sipos said Wednesday before her son gave away the first duck donated as part of the national program. "It was a way I could teach him, and in teaching him, I gave myself a role - I got the parental role back."

Ms. Sipos and her husband, Rob, formed a nonprofit organization working with the Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt University in Nashville to get the duck to cancer patients.

ASCEND, which stands for the Anne Scandalios Cancer Ends Now Directive, is now working to get the ducks to patients nationwide.

Gabe, now 5 and cancer-free, didn't say much when his mom held him in her arms and he handed the first duck to 3-year-old Zachary Moore of Summerville.

The ducks come with a compact disc with interactive activities for the children, said Russ Pritchard, the chairman of the board of ASCEND. The discs also contain cancer information for the family.