A new normal

Kinsey Bogart, 21, shows off some of the artwork she has created while she has been connected to dialysis at her home in Belleview, Fla. on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. Kinsey has been on dialysis nearly her entire life, starting when she was 8 months old. Now 21, she’s thriving despite an ongoing kidney disease, a failed kidney transplant and multiple genetic conditions. Her mother, Holly, an RN, is her constant support partner and helps her with her dialysis at home. For the last 6 months, Kinsey is doing her dialysis at home instead of spending 3 days a week traveling to Gainesville and back for a 3 1/2 hours dialysis each day. The transition to home hemodialysis, supported by the Fresenius Kidney Care team in Ocala, has been life changing. She feels stronger, sleeps better and has started traveling again. Kinsey likes to uses her dialysis time to create art. She has sold her art to raise funds for the Children’s Miracle Network and UF Health Shands Children’s Hospital. Last year alone, she raised $12,178 by selling her artwork and almost $46,000 since she started in 2018. [Bruce Ackerman/Ocala Gazette] 2025.

Life may never be “normal” for Kinsey Bogart, 21, of Belleview, but since late December she has found a new normal that makes life both doable and enjoyable.

And that’s in part because she has started home hemodialysis and has a loving care team of her mother, Holly; father, Damon; and medical staff. She also draws upon her deep Christian faith and innate cheerful and impish personality.

Kinsey’s kidneys and liver failed in 2004 when she was 8 months old and although her liver started functioning again, she has been on dialysis since then, except for 2 1/2 years after she had a kidney transplant in 2015. But that transplant failed.

Born prematurely at 35 weeks, Kinsey first was misdiagnosed as having the rare atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome. But that was incorrect and what causes her kidney issues remains undiagnosed. She is a member of the Undiagnosed Diseases Network. She does have some genetic abnormalities, as well as cardiomyopathy, autism, ADHD and chronic pain in her hips and spine. She is not eligible for another kidney transplant because that also could fail since doctors can’t determine why the first one didn’t work.

For 11 1/2 years, starting when Kinsey was a baby, Holly hooked her daughter up to an at-home peritoneal dialysis machine that would run for 10 hours at night.

Kinsey would get off the machine in the morning and attend Ward-Highlands Elementary School in Ocala and later, Belleview Middle School. Holly worked as a school nurse in Ocala, while Damon worked for Marion County. He now is employed by the city of Wildwood’s Public Works Department.

Kinsey had problems tolerating the transplant that she received when she was 12 and a sixth grader. She made it through eighth grade, but by July was hospitalized and put on hemodialysis when her transplant failed.

Dialysis is needed when people’s kidneys can’t process all the fluid they take in. With peritoneal dialysis, a fluid that removes toxins is pumped into the abdomen, left for a set time and is then removed. The procedure can be done at home and the equipment can be portable. However, this dialysis needs to be done daily. With hemodialysis, the blood is cleansed when the dialysis machine pulls it from the body and then returns it. Hemodialysis often is done at a center and usually is offered three times a week.

When Kinsey went on hemodialysis, she and Holly traveled three days a week for 6 1/2 years to UF Health Shands Children’s Hospital in Gainesville, starting their hour-long journey many days in darkness so Kinsey could be on the machine by 7 a.m.

Since late December, however, she’s been working with the home therapy clinic of Fresenius Kidney Care and receiving home hemodialysis, a service available to those adults who qualify for the treatment.

Holly explained that home hemodialysis is not available for children in this area and the closest place for such children’s treatment is in the Panhandle area. But Kinsey is an adult now. And with the hemodialysis, which Holly supervises four days a week, Kinsey’s blood pressure is down, she is off of several medications “and I feel more energetic and less tired,” she said.

But there’s more responsibility for Holly. It takes her about one-half hour to set up the machine. She has to order supplies and do labs to monitor Kinsey’s blood. Holly takes the blood samples to Walgreen’s in an ice pack and the results are back in a day or two. Holly has quit her job to be more available for Kinsey.

Although the caretaker’s tasks for home hemodialysis patients might seem daunting, Fresenius’ Angeliz Ramos reassures those who might consider it that caretakers get hands-on training, as well as continuing support. You don’t need to have previous medical training to take on the at-home dialysis supervisor role.

Ramos manages Fresenius’ home therapy clinics in the Ocala market, which also includes The Villages area as well as Inverness.

Caretakers are trained at a clinic and learn how to troubleshoot complications that may arise. Fresenius helps patients and caretakers initially set up the equipment. Then, a nurse is on call and technical support is available over the phone, according to Ramos.

Ramos said that because home hemodialysis can be done more often than the standard three days a week at a clinic, the at-home dialysis can run more slowly, gently and less aggressively than at a clinic. And patients tend to be exposed to fewer side effects and complications.

Kinsey is pleased to be home. She can do art projects and play the piano while on dialysis. She said, however, that she misses her friends at Shands, including fellow dialysis patients, and she misses working with an art teacher once a week, who is part of Shands’ Arts in Medicine program.

Nevertheless, Kinsey keeps up a Shands’ connection as she still has multiple medical appointments that require her to visit various specialists there. She also is involved with the Dance Marathon at the University of Florida, a student-run group that benefits Shands Children’s Hospital through the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. Children’s Miracle Network is a fundraising group supporting pediatric hospitals. Kinsey raised $12,178 for the 2025 Dance Marathon this spring. Since she started working with the Dance Marathon in 2018, she has raised $47,000.

She has a Facebook page, Caring for Kinsey, and an Instagram account, kinseywarrior. For 2026, she has a goal of reaching $5,000 for the Dance Marathon and has raised $250 so far. A link for Dance Marathon fundraising is on her Facebook page.

Kinsey sometimes sells her art to help support the Dance Marathon. She has a coloring book, “My Vibrant Island,” that Shands’ Arts in Medicine teachers helped her prepare.

She likes painting with acrylics or using colored pens or crayons. She fashions bracelets and keychains from beads and likes painting on wood, completing paint-by-numbers projects, doing diamond art and creating cards. She is attracted to vivid colors.

In the fall, her family hosts the Kinsey Lynn Bogart Benefit Golf Tournament to raise money for her medical needs. They could use a generator, Holly said, because if the power goes out, Kinsey’s dialysis machine needs to keep functioning.

Kinsey told about an orthodontist from Houston who saw her Instagram account. She has 46,800 followers. The orthodontist sent Kinsey some Nintendo equipment for her birthday two years ago.

When it arrived, “I was hysterical,” Kinsey said. “I was crying. I thought, ‘Jesus is blessing us.'”

Kinsey does not take her partnership with Jesus lightly. Her family attends Trinity Baptist Church of Ocala and in late March, Kinsey gave a testimony before the congregation. Her video is on the church’s YouTube page.

In it, she tells how for a while, when she was awaiting a kidney transplant, she also was waiting for a heart transplant. She asked her father if the surgery would hurt. He told her the kidney surgery would hurt, but the heart surgery would hurt more.

She said she joked with him that “I couldn’t have a heart transplant because Jesus is in my heart.”

Jesus may have been listening because her heart condition improved and she no longer needed a heart transplant.

She told the congregation she didn’t tell them about what she’s experienced in life, “so you’ll feel sorry for me but to testify to the power of Jesus in all of us.”

So, what would Kinsey recommend to someone facing some of the challenges she does?

“You can do it if I can go through it. Stay positive. Think of good things,” she said.

Mom Holly echoes Kinsey.

“Never give up on your child,” she said. “God has a plan. It may not always be what you want it to be. But in the end, it’s not always what the doctors say it will be either. Don’t give up.”

Kinsey can be reached via her Facebook and Instagram pages. For information about Fresenius, go to freseniuskidneycare.com

Kinsey Bogart – Creates Artwork While On Dialysis

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