The season’s captain has a love for sports and all things Hawkeye.

By Katelyn Weisbrod

[email protected]

For 7-year-old Kinzie Hemann, a rare blood disease wasn’t going to stop her from being an athlete.

In fact, it has hardly slowed her down.

This year’s first Kid Captain said she wants to either coach or play sports when she grows up.

“She’s very active and very busy,” said Kinzie’s father, Josh Hemann. “She likes to do flag football, basketball. Those wouldn’t be possible if she wasn’t getting her medicine.”

Kinzie is part of the Kid Captain program, which highlights a different story each week about a pediatric patient at the University of Iowa Children’s Hospital. The kids are introduced on the field during home football games. Kinzie will take the field during Saturday’s game against Miami (Ohio).

At the first home football game of the season in Kinnick Stadium on Saturday, Kinzie will walk out of the tunnel alongside the players and coaches of the Hawkeyes and stand beside them during the national anthem.

Not every trip to Iowa City from Kinzie’s hometown of Reinbeck, Iowa, has been quite this exciting. She has been receiving treatments from the UI Children’s Hospital Hemophilia Treatment Center since she was a baby for a rare genetic disorder called von Willebrand Type 3.

People with von Willebrand disease lack a protein allowing blood to clot, meaning they may get nosebleeds or bruise easily. Type 3 is the most severe, according to the National Hemophilia Foundation.

Kinzie now receives medicine every other day to provide the missing protein, but when she was younger, she only received this on an as-needed basis, which resulted in some emergency situations.

Around her second birthday, Kinzie had a nosebleed that did not stop even when she received her medicine. Her parents brought her to the UI Children’s Hospital, but the nurses and doctors struggled to insert an IV into her blood-deprived veins to give her the medicine.

“That was probably one of the scariest times we had,” said Kinzie’s mother, Heather Hemann. “The next day, the doctors came in and told us our options for better access, and that’s when we got the port and started treating every other day instead of treating when it happened.”

The “port” is a device that provides a path into Kinzie’s heart. The nurses can use the port to give Kinzie her medicine if her veins are too hard to access.

Kinzie has had it for about five years, and it brings an increased risk of infection. Right now, they are using the port as a backup if they cannot access her veins.

This June, Kinzie even started poking herself to receive the medicine, something she learned how to do at hemophilia camp. She’s on her way to becoming self-sufficient in her care.

There is no cure for Kinzie’s disease, so she will continue to receive her missing protein through an IV for the rest of her life to manage the bleeding.

Kinzie’s older sister, Jayla, 8, and younger brother, Milo, 2, also have von Willebrand disease; both their parents carry the gene. However, they have Type 1, much milder than Kinzie’s condition.

“There’s been some scary times where we don’t know where the future would hold for Kinzie, whether she could do the things she wanted to do in life,” Heather Hemann said. “But we’re learning a lot, and she’s doing well. I think it has kind of brought our family together more.”

The medicine helps keep Kinzie healthy so she can continue to stay active and play the sports she loves.

Riley McLeod, a marketing coordinator for the Children’s Hospital, said it’s inspiring to see the positive attitudes the kids show throughout their treatments.

“A lot of these kids go through things that us as adults never have to face,” she said. “The way that they do it with a smile on their face and the strength and bravery they exude every single day is very inspiring.”

Kinzie said she looks forward to walking through the tunnel onto the field Saturday. She’s been a lifelong Hawkeye fan, and someday, when she’s grown up, she might stand on those same sidelines in a uniform or with a whistle.