Richard Deming, M.D.
The two words that come up most often, however, have more to do with humility than heroics:
he is more super human than superhuman.
“Passion and compassion. Dr. Deming brings those to everything he does,” says David Benson, executive vice president of the American Cancer Society’s North Region, which covers Iowa and a dozen other states.
Benson has known Dr. Deming for more than 15 years and can tell you he doesn’t dabble. He doesn’t have a low gear. And he certainly doesn’t hesitate to join others on their journey, including their highest highs and lowest lows.
When people try to describe MercyOne Richard Deming Cancer Center’s Medical Director, Richard Deming, M.D., he tends to sound like a superhero.
“So many of us wait for an invitation, but he enters into that space unabashedly,” Benson says. “He’s always ready with the right words, a pat on the back or a kick in the pants.”
Benson works with a lot of inspiring people — cancer survivors, physicians, volunteers — but “Dr. Deming is in a class of his own.”
The super human grew up in a speck of a town in South Dakota, where his dad worked at a grain elevator and his mom was a checker at the grocery store. He was one of three children — in order: Tom, “Dick” and Harriet — who shared a typical, sunny 1950s childhood. He says the family was probably poor but didn’t know it, since there wasn’t much difference between the haves and the have-nots in small town South Dakota.
They moved to the “big” city — Madison, South Dakota, population: 5,000 — when Dick was in fifth grade, and he discovered a knack for school. He was an eager student and enjoyed soaking up new information, which gave him a sense of identity and purpose.
He was also just a good kid. Before a middle school dance, the principal called Dick into his office and made a request: If any girl wasn’t asked to dance, it was Dick’s job to take her hand. And so he did. That’s just how he was raised.
When he was a junior in high school, his mom was diagnosed with cancer. At first, nobody knew what the problem was, but changes in her personality landed her at the state mental hospital in Yankton, a big old mansion that reminded Dick of a haunted house. After a week or so, a doctor there suspected that Dick’s mom had brain cancer and sent her to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
A Mayo neurosurgeon removed a tumor from her brain and then sent her home. As a token of thanks, Dick’s dad looked up the doctor’s home address and sent him a pheasant, freshly shot, cleaned and packed in a milk carton.
Dick’s mom lived for seven more years, to the age of 52, even as cancer besieged her lungs. She died a couple of days before Thanksgiving, while Dick was driving back home from Omaha, where he was in his second year at the Creighton University medical school.
Sometimes he wonders how her treatment might have been different today. He figures she might not have lived longer, even with modern chemotherapy, but she certainly could have benefited from more social and emotional support. Her journey was probably lonely.
“There was a real stigma about having cancer back then,” he says. “If Mom had ever wanted to talk about cancer or the possibility of death or dying, it was all
‘Oh, everything’s going to be OK.’ People just didn’t talk about it.”
However, he chose to become a healer because of his mom. A few years ago, he wrote her name on a prayer flag that he took on one of his trips to Mount Everest and it now hangs with others on a garland at the YMCA in downtown Des Moines. The message stands out in black marker: “Odetta, the inspiration for my career in caring. Thank you for showing me the meaning of compassion.”
After medical school, Dr. Deming headed to a Navy internship in San Diego, where he learned how to care for submarine crews and became a full-fledged scuba diver. From there, he served a stint as a medical officer for a Navy bomb squad in Hawaii.
He was drawn to radiation oncology later, during a residency in San Francisco and then as a staffer at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. He liked how it challenged both halves of his brain: the technical half, for calculating math and physics, and the intuitive half, for relating to patients as human beings.
But still, he favors one over the other.
“Over the years, I’ve come to understand that my success in oncology owes more to my humanities education than math and science,” he says. “I could have taken 10 more classes in calculus and organic chemistry, and I wouldn’t be a better cancer doctor. But more literature and philosophy? Those might actually enhance my ability to engage patients and their families in the really important psychological, emotional and spiritual dimensions of approaching a diagnosis where mortality is front and center. Even if you have a curable cancer, the thought that your mortality is at risk still enters the picture.”
This realization inspired him to endow a chair of medical humanities at Creighton, his alma mater. The new professor will give medical students a heftier dose of art, music and literature than whatever they happened to pick up while they were charging hard to get into medical school.
“Exposure to the humanities enhances the development of positive physician qualities such as empathy, reflection and wisdom,” says Dr. Robert Dunlay, dean of Creighton’s school of medicine. “Dr. Deming helps his patients find spiritual fulfillment by focusing on what brings them joy in the face of adversity.”
That’s certainly true at MercyOne Des Moines, where Dr. Deming arrived in 1989. Over the last 30 years, he’s steadily redefined what it means to provide compassionate care — for his own patients and the entire MercyOne community. Even before he became the Cancer Center’s Medical Director in 2010, he spread the gospel of Sir William Osler (1849-1919), the Johns Hopkins Hospital founder who believed that “the good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient.”
Once, after a friend’s son accompanied him on his rounds for a day, the friend told Dr. Deming that his job seemed pretty easy: “My son said all you do is give hugs and get hugs all day long.”
But hugs are only part of it. A few years ago, Dr. Deming discovered the emerging field of narrative medicine, which encourages patients to share their stories, to open up about the experiences that give their lives meaning and purpose. Dr. Deming finds this approach to be remarkably therapeutic for many patients. He wants to know what makes patients tick and what motivates them to push forward.
Through those give-and-take discussions, Dr. Deming nudges patients to make more room in their lives for the things they enjoy: spending time with loved ones, getting outdoors, engaging in physical activity.
He helped develop a MercyOne program that helps cancer survivors with counseling, nutrition, meditation and all-around wellness.
“This is radically different than standard cancer treatment,” he says. “This philosophical approach is about seeing cancer not as a barrier but as a springboard to living your best possible life.”
Three decades of patients have taught Dr. Deming about cancer’s transformative power. He often mentions post-traumatic stress as a way to introduce its lesser-known twin, called post-traumatic growth. If people have enough support when they trudge through pain or misery, they can come out on the other side with a clearer understanding of their own strength. And when that happens, they’re actually better prepared for challenges in the future.
That’s why Dr. Deming pushes himself so hard — to run marathons, to tackle Ironman triathlons, to go helicopter-skiing in Alaska and canyoneering in Oman.
He likes to stretch his own limits and snap them, like stale rubber bands. That’s also why he founded Above + Beyond Cancer, the nonprofit that leads cancer survivors on awe-inspiring expeditions. He’s trekked with survivors up the slopes of Machu Picchu, Mount Kilimanjaro and the Himalayas. He’s helped them literally rise to the challenge.
A Des Moines man named Brian Triplett wrote an essay about one of those trips several years ago, noting that Dr. Deming “skips up the mountain as if gravity doesn’t apply to him. It’s the middle of the journey toward Everest, and some of the survivors are having a tough day. He sings out tunes from his favorite musicals and shakes his shoulders and hips as if no one is watching, although he knows they are because he’s trying to turn his energy contagious.”
When he shuffled past a Nepalese porter who was lugging 200 pounds of gear, the porter grinned and said, “That dancing man makes me happy.” Back in Iowa, that dancing man often asks his patients what brought them the most joy since their last visit.
Sometimes it catches them off guard and they have to think for a moment.
But if they ever turn the question back around and ask Dr. Deming, he could answer it right away. It’s what he does every relentless day. It’s less a career in medicine than a ministry of healing.
As he puts it, “I can’t think of anything that would give me more joy than what I’m doing.”
