How it all began…
In 2017, I was diagnosed with Stage 4 Lung Cancer. After multiple surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation, I was no longer able to continue my work as a Software Engineer. For Christmas in 2020, my family and I decided we would make our Christmas gifts for each other. I chose to make the wooden ducks my father, Pat, had made as gifts for family and friends when he retired. Pictured below are my father’s original ducks.
What started as a simple Christmas gift quickly turned into something much bigger than I ever expected. Friends and family began asking if they could purchase ducks of their own, and that’s when the idea came to me — I could sell the ducks and donate the money to help people who were going through cancer like I was. In October 2021, Ducks for Cancer was born. Since then, these wooden ducks, inspired by my father’s original design, have helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to support cancer patients and their families through The Chemo Bag Project and The Love Bus.
All of the ducks are handmade from clear pine and are cut, shaped, and sanded by hand. Each duck is painted with two coats of paint — a primer and a exterior paint — to ensure they last for years. No two ducks are exactly the same, which makes each one unique. Every duck also comes with my “lifetime” guarantee. And, much to the dismay of some people, I still use the same googly eyes my father used.