'I've just got to get on with it': Kate Garraway to return to Good Morning Britain
Kate Garraway has returned to Good Morning Britain to discuss husband Derek Draper’s coronavirus, saying “it’s a very desperate situation”.
The presenter said it was “really emotional” to be back and “like coming out of a little bubble of sadness”.
She said of Mr Draper’s condition: “Wonderfully his eyes are opening but we have no real knowledge of what he can see and feel or hear.”
Speaking to her Good Morning Britain colleagues Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid, Garraway said there had been “so many different stages” since Mr Draper had gone into hospital.
Recalling his early days in hospital she said: “I got some texts from him saying when he first went in… show this picture to the children and tell them I’m doing great.
“There was a feeling of terror and then suddenly it escalated and they were saying it’s all about the lungs…”
She added: “Each stage has been a new terror and just when I thought we were moving forward, then suddenly we know how it can affect your body everywhere, nerves, everything”.
Garraway announced she would be back presenting on Good Morning Britain on July 13.
She said doctors had told her “you’ve got to get on, you’ve got to get on with life”.
The TV and radio presenter said that she knew everybody was “dealing with stuff and the problem with this pandemic, it’s lives, it’s livelihoods, it’s fear and it’s anxiety and I just feel like I have got to get on and do the things I’m supposed to be good at”.
She said that her husband would want her to have returned to work, adding: “Derek would not just be saying ‘come back’ he would be saying, ‘why haven’t you done it before’?”
Speaking of Derek’s condition, she said: “About him and the coma for starters, it’s a strange word coma, he was induced into the coma because it was a way of resting the lungs when he had very acute Covid, of course now they’re no longer keeping him in the Coma, he sort of can’t wake up.
"There’s two types of coma – there’s the one we think of as vegetative coma, where someone’s completely unconscious, you know, you could stab them and they wouldn’t react - and there’s where Derek is which is a minimum state of consciousness."
She continued: “The doctors are saying to me now, ‘You’ve got to get on, you’ve got to get on with life’. For Darcey and Billy effectively right now, they’ve lost their dad, they haven’t, he’s there.. he’s not a presence as he should be in their lives."
Kate told her colleagues: “He’s absolutely fighting… he has an absolute will and if it’s about will to get back to see Darcey and Billy and me… I’ve been visualising sitting here with him. There’d be footage of him coming out of hospital.”