Lexington pediatrician who saw patients in her home to hang up her stethoscope
One of the first times I met Dr. Rebecca Bosomworth, I had been sitting in her office trying to nurse a 4-day-old newborn who had screamed for what seemed like the entire time we were there.
I’d been up all night with him, and I was an emotional mess.
What if he wasn’t getting enough milk?
What if his jaundice wasn’t clearing up and he got brain damage?
What if something was wrong with him?
Dr. Bos looked him over and pronounced him a beautiful, healthy boy.
Before she left the exam room, she wrapped me in a big hug and said two words that spoke directly to my anxious, exhausted spirit: “Trust God.”
Bosomworth has been our family’s pediatrician for more than 13 years.
She’s always worn T-shirts and jeans, socks with horses or cats on them, Winnie the Pooh character earrings.
I don’t remember ever seeing her in a white coat.
But I have seen her laugh as one of my kids climbed on her back and wrapped his arms around her neck.
Seen her roll her cat Dennis (a girl) up like a burrito in the paper on the exam table for pure entertainment.
Watched her wave her flashing “magic wand” over them to make them feel better.
Dr. Bos has been with us through stomach bugs and strep throats.
Four years ago, she wrapped me in one of those big hugs and told us one of our children had Type 1 diabetes.
Now she’s about to retire. And while I don’t know where my boys will go for care, I know for certain there will never be another Dr. Bos.
A career in the horse industry
Pediatrics is somewhat of a second career for Bosomworth, who moved to Lexington in 1978 to work at the University of Kentucky.
A lifelong horse lover, she got her first horse when she was 13.
“I saved up the $325 through babysitting at 50 cents an hour,” she said in a recent interview with the Herald-Leader.
She remembers cutting out ads for horses and taping them up around her mirror before she finally found her horse Duke.
Growing up on one of the Finger Lakes, in Skaneateles, N.Y., she worked for a local pharmacy and remembers delivering prescriptions on horseback with Duke during snowstorms.
“I thought I wanted to be a veterinarian,” she said.
Each summer, her family would drive down to Tennessee to visit relatives, and Bosomworth remembers telling her mother, “Just wake me up when we get to Lexington.”
“I had to be woken up to see all the fences, Calumet and Claiborne,” she said.
After attending a few different colleges and finishing her pre-veterinary work at Cornell University, she moved to Lexington to teach in UK’s horseback riding program, where she worked from 1978 to 1982.
After UK ended its riding program, Bosomworth started her own riding stables.
“I was working on a Thoroughbred farm breaking yearlings and a lot of mucking stalls and grooming,” she said.
The farm, on property that is now Gleneagles subdivision in the Hamburg area, leased a barn to Bosomworth, and she was in business.
She also supported herself by traveling to horse sales as a handler and working as a “very small time breeder of show horses.”
“I did dog training and all sorts of different things along the way,” she said. “My parents used to ask me, ‘Are you eating?’”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Peanut butter goes a long way.”
All the while, Bosomworth still intended to go to veterinary school. But there were complications.
Kentucky doesn’t have a veterinary school, and as a veterinarian caring for horses, she said, “especially a woman vet, in this town, you’ll always be an intern.”
In the meantime, she had met the man who would become her children’s father.
“Going to medical school seemed an awful lot like going to vet school,” she quipped, “except you only had to learn one species.”
So at 33, she started medical school at UK.
She and her first husband, also a physician, got married during her first week of medical school. She had a baby daughter 10 days before taking the first part of her medical board exams.
Another daughter was born three months into her year as an intern. She was responsible for 33 babies in the neonatal intensive care unit at the time.
Bosomworth was 40 when she finished her education.
“Working with a foal and working with children are so similar,” she joked. “You’ve got this little bitty baby that can’t talk.”
And, as in the equine industry, she said, “It’s got very nervous owners.”
Westside Pediatrics
After graduating medical school, Bosomworth joined the staff at Westside Pediatrics on Alexandria Drive in January 1997. Her partners were Dr. Jacqueline Campbell, Dr. Barry Ramsey and Dr. Charles Taylor.
In 2011, the last of those partners, Ramsey, who had been our family’s pediatrician, retired.
And that’s when my middle son first met Dr. Bos.
He was about 3 at the time, and he’d maybe somehow gotten the idea he was going to meet the Wizard of Oz.
Whatever the issue was, she didn’t meet his expectations.
When Dr. Bos came in and sat down on the stool he had recently been spinning on, he looked her in the eye and pronounced: “You’re not BOS! You’re just a girl!”
It was one of those moments when, as a parent, you want to crawl under the carpet.
But Dr. Bos took it in stride and patiently explained that girls can be doctors too.
She recently looked into that same boy’s ears, now 17 years old, and whistled like a bird, just as she has every time since that first meeting.
And this time, she wryly explained that he shouldn’t worry when he goes to another doctor next year and that doesn’t happen: “Not all doctors can hear the birds,” she said.
An office at home
In 2022, fed up with the red tape of the medical bureaucracy, Dr. Bos decided to downsize and close her office.
She printed a list of the families she provided care for and highlighted the ones she “wasn’t ready to say goodbye to” in pink, slashing her patient load to about 500.
Thankfully, we made the cut.
She closed the Westside Pediatrics office on Alexandria Drive and moved her office into the front room of her home, just down the road from Keeneland.
Now, a visit to her office is like the old days when doctors made house calls. Only, in this case, the patients come to her.
It’s all there: the same bright yellow cabinets that double as an exam table, the mechanical scales, shelves of old paper charts.
There’s a chicken coop in the backyard (with a “Becky’s Eggplant” sign on the fence) and horses in the field behind the house.
Cats and dogs are likely to wander into the exam room at any time.
Her front window looks out on a row of bird feeders.
“I can remember going to my doctor as a kid, and it was in the basement of his house,” she said.
She said it’s brought her joy to be able to share her farm life with the children she cares for.
The business of medicine
But the challenge of working as a lone provider in the current insurance environment is one of the reasons Bosomworth has decided to retire in April.
Sometimes she doesn’t get paid at all for the services she’s provided.
“Back when I first started, I can remember Humana reps coming to the office: ‘Is everything going smoothly?’” Bosomworth recalled. “There’s no provider reps anymore. I’m just to the point of, ‘Oh well, I didn’t do it for the money anyhow.’ It doesn’t change how I feel for the kid.”
“$600 there and $600 there and $600 there. Thank God I didn’t get into it for the money,” she said. “At least coming here, I’m not losing money. I don’t have any employees.”
But that means she’s also the receptionist, nurse, office manager, insurance benefits coordinator and IT department.
One of the last straws came earlier this year, when she got a call on a Friday evening from one of her families.
“They could not get their autistic daughter’s medication because Medicaid did not recognize me as a doctor anymore,” she said.
Bosomworth spent two days on the phone trying to get that resolved, when she had already worked through that same process one month earlier.
At about the same time, she paid her malpractice premiums.
And then she celebrated her 69th birthday.
“I said, I’m not going to do this again when I’m 70,” she said. “If I could just be a doctor, I’m sure I could keep going.”
‘I have a whole lot of children out there’
Bosomworth and her second husband, Bob Eigel, a retired soil scientist for the U.S. government, met on Match.com and celebrated their 10th anniversary in 2025.
They enjoy their dogs, cats, chickens and horses. Bosomworth said she spends a lot of time with her own horse, and she also boards two horses for a childhood friend.
She’s hoping to use some of her extra time in retirement to get back into trail riding.
“Life is good,” Bosomworth said. “I’m living right here on my little slice of heaven. ...This was my dream as a kid: Just wake me up when I get to Lexington..”
She has three children and three grandsons who all live nearby.
And she has a whole extended family of patients spanning multiple generations. She said her “second great-grandpatient” was recently born.
“They treat me like their grandmother,” Bosomworth said of her patients. “It’s the relationships that’s the important thing. That’s what’s kept me going.”
Years ago, her daughter painted a giraffe on one of the doors at the old office with height markings on it, and at each checkup, Dr. Bos would take a photograph for her records with the child in front of it.
At the next visit, she’d scroll back through all the photos, oohing and ahhing over how much they’d grown over the years.
When she moved out of the office, she adjusted a door frame in the front of her home and rehung the giraffe door so she could keep up the routine.
One day soon, when she retires, the giraffe door will be moved out into the front yard, so patients and their parents can continue the picture-taking tradition while dropping by to say hello to Dr. Bos.
“I have a whole lot of children out there,” she said.
This story was originally published December 29, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
