‘He’s very, very sick’: Kate Garraway says husband may not recover from coma following coronavirus

ITV presenter Kate Garraway has revealed doctors don’t know if her husband Derek will recover from his fight with coronavirus 

TV presenter and former I’m A Celebrity contestant Kate Garraway has opened up about her husband Derek who has been hospitalised for the last 10 weeks with coronavirus.

Speaking to her colleagues on ITV’s Good Morning Britain she said: “There will be tears, by the way, I will try to keep them in.”

Her husband Derek Draper was admitted to hospital nearly two months ago with the virus and was placed in intensive care. Doctors then placed him in an induced coma.

“He’s still with us, he has fought the most extraordinary battle and I hate the idea of that but it is a battle. The fact that he’s still here and holding on, I’m so grateful that he is still here.”

She continued: “He’s very, very sick and as time goes on it’s a virus, it’s a little bit like a computer virus, the doctors manage one bit extraordinarily well and there seems to be hope and then there is something else.

“It’s affected him from the top of his head to the tip of his toes.”

Negative

While he is now testing negative for Covid-19 and in essence has ‘fought the virus’, it has as Kate said: “wreaked extraordinary damage on his body.”

Doctors said they “don’t know” if Derek will survive the damage. One doctor told Kate “he is the worst effected person he has had to treat that’s lived.”

Her husband begged to be put into a coma because of the pressure on his lungs. At first, the doctors said no, but they then changed their minds to allow his lungs to rest.

“He said ‘I can’t take this, I feel like I’m suffocating.’ He said ‘Please let them put me in a coma’ and they didn’t want to do that. On Sunday they said: ‘We’re going to put him in a coma, we think we have to do that.’

Her husband told her, “‘You’ve saved my life’. I think he thought I persuaded the doctors to put him in the coma. But obviously, I hadn’t.”

“He said, ‘you’ve saved my life, and I don’t just mean now, I mean everything. Being married to you and the children’.

“Then I said, ‘I love you, I love you,’ and the doctors said, ‘he’s gone, he’s under,’ and that was it.”

Rare

Mr Draper has no underlying health issues but Kate wanted to stress that what happened to him was extremely rare. However, she told the program that doctors were beginning to see “completely unforeseen circumstances” connected to the virus.

She then revealed that while her husband is no longer in a medically induced coma, doctors don’t know if he will recover.

“They can’t say he can’t recover, they can’t say he will recover. We don’t know how long it will take. Weeks and months, it could be up to a year, I am praying there will be progress before then.”

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