Kate’s agony goes on: The heart’s been ripped from our family
Kate Garraway reveals her hopes, fear and sadness over husband Derek’s continuing struggle to get well, admitting the heart has been ‘ripped out of our family’…
It’s no secret that Good Morning Britain’s Kate Garraway, 53, has been coping with a living nightmare, ever since her husband, Derek Draper, was admitted to hospital with Coronavirus at the end of March.
The former political lobbyist has survived the deadly disease, but has been left with so many ongoing issues that doctors can’t promise he will ever recover fully.
He is still in intensive care, has lost a shocking 8st, has ongoing heart, lung and kidney problems, and issues digesting his food.
In fact, he is one of only five people in the world believed to have suffered such damage to his body and survive.
As Kate explained, ‘Covid can affect every cell in the body.’
But last week she spoke out in the hope it would help every family affected by Covid to ‘cherish love, hang on to hope and manage the fear we are all living with in various ways’.
Derek, 53, awoke from his coma in June but Kate admitted he is still in a ‘minimally conscious state’.
As she told YOU magazine, ‘ We hope and believe he will come out of it, but we just don’t know… You don’t feel any euphoria with improvement because you have the feeling the next day something will have gone wrong.’
Adding: ‘Heartbreak is wearing… Covid has ripped the heart out of our family. And I don’t know if we’re ever going to get it back.’
Throughout these hellish weeks and months, the mumof-two has been trying to keep as positive as possible, for the sake of the couple’s children – Darcey, 14, and Billy, 11.
But she admitted in a recent interview: ‘There’s been more than the odd day where I’ve just been consumed with fear. But as a mum, you can’t go to bed and cry for 24 hours…’
As for GMB, she explained, ‘I very consciously didn’t want to talk too much about Derek on air to bring anybody down – but it’s a balance.’
Kate revealed that since July, she and the kids have been talking to Derek on FaceTime, while a nurse held up an iPad. ‘Sometimes I’ll just take the phone into the garden, so that he can hear the kids mucking about – but we don’t know where he is in his thinking,’ she said.
Meanwhile, the former
I’m A Celebrity contestant revealed she’s been thinking about changing the patio doors – as that was one of the last happy, domestic conversations she’d had with Derek one uneventful Saturday, just hours before he fell ill, and their lives changed.
And Kate still has hope: ‘I can’t wait for him to come home to us, that’s my dream.’
We truly hope that dream comes true.
‘I have been consumed with fear. But I can’t go to bed and cry for 24 hours’