Brooke Shields' oldest daughter, Rowan Henchy, received a shocking diagnosis of type 1 diabetes when she was a freshman.
In 2018, Rowan noticed symptoms of the debilitating disease, including weight loss, worsening eyesight and skin infections.
“First of all, I lost a lot of weight, very quickly,” he said. People. “But I was eating two meals [for] “I consumed a lot of food and lost weight even faster the more I ate.”
“Another thing is that you urinate constantly,” she added. “And then I started losing my eyesight and then I had a very bad infection in my toe. So these are clear warning signs of undiagnosed type 1 diabetes.”
Rowan is now a senior at Wake Forest University, where her younger sister Grier, 18, just started her freshman year.
He Mother of the bride The actress said: “It was an adjustment.”
Rowan had to deal with the diagnosis and adjust to a new school that same year.
“The first few months were tough because all my friends from my old school were hanging out with boys and I decided to go to an all-girls school and then I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. So it was a tough year overall,” she recalls.
“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 continued. “But freshman year, it sucked. It was more like, ‘This happened. How can I continue to live my life and not be sad and depressed? ’”
He said learning to control the disease helped him a lot.
Her mother Brooke added: “I felt helpless because we didn’t know what to do and then all of a sudden she became completely autonomous. She was old enough to give herself insulin. And as a 14-year-old, injecting yourself multiple times a day is a very fast maturation process. She became very competent. She had to grow up quickly.”
Brooke shares daughters Rowan and Grier with her husband, comedy writer Chris Henchy.
