She continues, “Often, it’s hard to breathe or walk,” she writes of her illness in her memoir. “Some days I wake up consumed by pain. It’s like knives stabbing me over and over again in my joints. Chase gave me a reason to keep pushing through.”
In May 2016, Watkins gave herself another reason to keep pushing: a son, Chance, whom she adopted from her hometown of Des Moines, Iowa.
“You don’t want your kids to know you think you might die. I don’t want my daughter or son to feel my pain,” she says. “I’ve got to keep a normal face on.”
“My life, my sick life has been tinged with illness. But I refuse to be defined by it.”
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