Honoring those who serve us

“Hometown Holiday Heroes” Parade is Saturday

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When Cindy Deutscher stops in a store or worships in church, she is likely to see some of her patients from Avera Flandreau Hospital and Clinic.
Saturday night, everyone at the holiday parade will catch a glimpse of a woman who has helped the community’s residents in the emergency room, hospital and clinic when Deutscher leads the Hometown Heroes Holiday parade as the parade marshal.
It is a fitting culmination of a 23-year career as a Certified Physician’s Assistant in Flandreau and is a nod to the hard work healthcare providers, first responders, educators and others have endured in the 2020 pandemic. The parade begins at 6 p.m., leaving from the Moody County Courthouse and winding around to Second Avenue.
‘I am so honored but just feel very special and honored that they thought of me for that,” she said of the parade.
Deutscher, 63, will retire Jan. 3 and has agreed to continue to fill in part-time as needed in the community where she has practiced family medicine for people of all ages, from just after they are born until the end of their lives.
“I feel I’m kind of privileged to work in a community where I can live and be a part of,” she said. “I feel like sometimes I go home learning more from my patients than what I’ve done for them.”
Deutscher, a Scotland, S.D. native and graduate of Dakota Wesleyan University, started her career as a registered nurse and in 1997, earned her certification to further her medical education. She had been working as a nurse in Pipestone, while her husband, Kevin, took a job working at the Avera Flandreau lab, where after nearly 38 years, he is the lab manager.

He took care of the couple’s three young children, Travis, Sara and Tyrel, while she studied at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks to earn her advanced degree.
After years as a nurse and seeing patients when they were sick, she said she was interested in the bigger picture, including what brought them to the hospital.
“I wondered what was going to happen to them after they left,” she said. “Now I’m in a position where I can help the patients throughout the year.”
Her job has provided a continuity of care that has allowed her to know patients and their families better. “You kind of get to help them with their care through the years as well as their ups and downs.”
Avera Flandreau administrator Scott Hargens said patients and staff both will miss Deutscher. She is “certainly a calming presence, truly a phenomenally kind-hearted, well-educated provider with many, many years of experience,” he said. “She absolutely loves the community of Flandreau. She loves her patients that she has been caring for for 23 years.”
Avera is in the process of hiring someone to fill Deutscher’s position and join a medical provider team that includes Dr. Scott Peterson and Abbie Entringer and Olivia Brown, both nurse practitioners.
In retirement, Deutscher hopes to visit her children and four grandchildren who are as close as Rapid City and as far away as California and North Carolina. She also hopes to spend more time with her mother in Scotland and pursue some hobbies, including gardening, on the couple’s acreage north of town.
She says goodbye to a career that she has enjoyed and one that has brought a variety of work. “I’ve enjoyed it because you just never know what the day is going to bring,” she said.
“I’m just so thankful. I do feel privileged to have been able to do this as long as I have and take care of the patients of the community.”