Brooke Shields’s Daughter Opens Up About Type 1 Diabetes (Exclusive)

Back in 2018, when Brooke Shields’s eldest daughter, Rowan Henchy, was a high school freshman, she began to notice some serious health issues. 

“First of all, I lost a lot of weight, really rapidly,” says Henchy, 21, whose dad is Brooke’s second husband, comedy writer and director Chris Henchy. “But I was eating two meals [for] each meal. I was consuming so much food and I was just losing weight even faster the more I would eat.”

“Another thing is you’re constantly peeing,” she adds. “And then my eyesight started to go and then I got a really bad toe infection. So these are blaring, red flags for undiagnosed Type 1 diabetes.” 

Diagnosed later that year, Rowan has been managing the condition ever since. Now a college senior at Wake Forest University, where her younger sister Grier, 18, just began her freshman year (leaving her mom with an empty nest) Rowan has been known to post Instagram photos showing her Dexcom patch, as a way to normalize the condition. 

But as her mom, Brooke, 59, says, “It was an adjustment.”

The diagnosis was one reason, but Rowan had also switched schools that year. “The first couple months were rough because all my friends at my old school were hanging out with boys and I decided to go to an all-girls school and then I got diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. So it was just a rough year all in all.” 

“That school ended up being my favorite place and I have my best friends in the world and Grier ended up going there, so it worked out,” she says. “But freshman year — it sucked. It was more of just like, ‘This happened. How can I continue living my life and not be all sad and depressed?’ ”

Learning about the condition and having the tools to manage it made all the difference.

It also helped that she matured, recalls her mom. Says Brooke, “I was feeling helpless because we didn’t know what to do and then she became completely autonomous with it. She was old enough to administer the insulin to herself. And as a 14-year-old, giving yourself shots multiple times a day is a very quick maturation process. She became very competent. She had to grow up quickly.”

Rowan agrees with her mom.

“There were times I wished that I was diagnosed at 5 because I knew a life without it,“ she admits. “But even from the four years that I’ve had it, there’s already been so many advancements in technology.” 

“I have a pump on my stomach and a Dexcom​​ patch on my stomach,” she says, of the continuous glucose monitor which sends readings to a smartphone app. “It’s a 24/7 job and I’m never off duty,” she says of monitoring her sugar levels. “But at the same time, it’s at the back of my mind. It only controls my thoughts when my blood sugar is too high or too low. Regardless of whatever headache, you find a way around it. It’s something that I have and it’s now just about managing.”

Brooke says it took a while for her to feel comfortable. “For a long time she wouldn’t wear the monitor either, and then the pricking of the fingers all day long, that finally got annoying to her. So having the monitor and having it on your phone [to monitor the levels], I can now look it up on my phone and then I don’t have to bug her.”

Brooke is also doing her part to raise awareness. She just completed a film, Quarter, a coming-of-age comedy about a young woman living with Type 1 diabetes, written and starring Kelly Bascom, based on her experience of living with the condition. Brooke and Rowan were part of the film’s panel at the Tribeca Film Festival this past spring to speak about normalizing the condition. “Kelly Bascom is the young woman who wrote it and directed it and stars in this,” explains Brooke. “It’s one of the first type one diabetes movies. There are no diabetes movies there. It’s interesting from a young girl’s perspective. So I think it’s going to be an important movie.”

For more on our exclusive interview with Brooke Shields and her daughters, pick up this week’s PEOPLE cover story, on newsstands Friday.