Kate Garraway breaks social media silence amid husband Derek Draper’s ongoing COVID-19 battle

Katie Garraway broke her social media silence on Thursday, as she took time out to send fellow TV presenter Eamonn Holmes a brief but heartwarming message.

The Good Morning Britain co-host, 53, has stepped back from all platforms in recent weeks, as her husband Derek Draper remains critically ill while battling COVID-19.

However, when Eamonn, 60, took to Instagram to celebrate his daughter Rebecca’s birthday, the star counted herself among the hundreds of well wishers.

Uploading a snap of himself posing with his offspring, This Morning presenter Eamonn wrote: ‘Many Happy Returns Darlin…

‘It was a very Special day when Becca my daughter came into the World and every time I’m with her continues to be Special.’

Responding to the post, Kate kept her response short and sweet, adding a string of heart emojis to the comments section. 

Kate’s husband Derek, 52, has been in a comatose state in intensive care for the past 10 weeks, after contracting novel coronavirus. 

Former lobbyist Derek is now free of COVID-19, but is suffering from serious residual complications. 

Kate broke down in tears as she revealed Derek thanked her for ‘saving his life’ before he slipped into a coma during his 10-week battle with coronavirus.   

The presenter became overcome with emotion during a recent instalment of GMB. as she admitted she ‘doesn’t know’ if Derek can recover from the ‘extraordinary damage’ COVID-19 has inflicted on his body, and may be in a coma for a year.  

Kate said: ‘Well there will be tears, I’ll try to keep them down, he’s still with us, he has fought the most extraordinary battle, the fact that he’s still here and holding on. 

‘I am so grateful that he’s still here, and I’ve got the option of praying while others have lost that.

‘He’s very, very sick and as time goes on, it’s a virus, it’s like a computer virus, the doctors manage one but there seems to be a flicker of hope and other things emerge and they’re fighting that. 

‘It has affected him from the top of his head to the tip of his toes. 

She added: ‘He is now COVID-free, he has tested negative, the fight with the virus is over but it’s wreaked extraordinary damage on his body and we don’t know if he can recover from that.’

Kate spoke for the first time about Derek’s initial admission to hospital in March, revealing the last thing he said to her before he was put in a medically-induced coma, was ‘I love you, you saved my life.’     

She said: ‘In that first week it looked like he was rallying. But then he was very bad, he couldn’t really speak to me, he could shout things to me on speakerphone. 

‘He was begging me, 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 as overnight we think we have to do that.”‘

‘He said: “I love you, I’m sorry I have to leave you, you’ve saved my life”. I think he thought I had asked the doctors to put in him in a coma. He said “being married to you, the children, you saved my life”.’ 

 Derek has previously credited Kate for saving him from depression which started during his career as a political advisor and led to a nervous breakdown and a stint in The Priory in the late 1990s.

Kate and Derek have been married for 14 years, with the former lobbyist cheering his wife on for the duration of her stint on I’m A Celebrity last year.

Following her stint on I’m A Celebrity, the couple were planning to renew their vows in the coming months after Kate revealed Derek had proposed for a second time. 

Kate went on to say Derek did not have any underlying health conditions and doctors were unable to explain why the virus had affected him in the way it had. 

She said: ‘He just got it very, very, very badly and we don’t know why. When you speak to the doctors, there’s so many things they tell you about to help you understand what he’s going through. 

‘There’s various markers that tell you how much infection is in his body when it was really raging. 

‘At one point, he was being transferred to a different hospital, there’s an enzyme the liver produces which goes up when you’re fighting infection, healthy it would be under 10, if it goes up to 200 then you’re really sick. 

‘When Derek was admitted to the second hospital, he was 1286. He was off the scale with infection. His lungs were solid and nobody thought he’d live. So it’s just extraordinary he’s still here.  

‘I’m so proud of him and most of all, the doctors and nurses around him are just incredible. They’re incredible with what they’ve done, with a disease they’re learning about every day.’

Speaking about the start of Derek’s illness, she said: ‘Derek had a painful shoulder for a couple months, and had been taking medication and having scans

‘He was due to have a steroid injection, he felt unwell and was home tutoring the kids. I got back and said ‘you don’t you look right babe, i think it’s the painkillers.’

‘I just had this weird feeling, asked if he had a cough. He didn’t, he said ‘I think I’ve got weird sinusitis.” 

‘I rang the doctor, I said ‘you don’t look great, no real feeling that it’s COVID, he had none of those symptoms.’

‘Around the 29/30 March, I came home came in and said “god you look ill”. He said he had a headache, numbness in his right hand, and was struggling to breathe, 

‘I rang Dr Hilary (Jones) and tried to get through, he talked to Derek. He said put me back on, I think you need to call an ambulance. I said “I can’t believe I’m calling an ambulance”, I was very scared.’

‘He said we need to take him to hospital straightaway, he didn’t have a temperature, and I helped him down the stairs.

‘He’d never been to hospital before, he never really gets ill and they put a mask on him to breathe. 

‘He said to the kids: ‘You’re the best children anyone could ask for, be good for mum, look after her and that was it. He went straight to intensive care.’  

Kate said that doctors are navigating a field of uncertainty when it comes to Derek’s prognosis, saying: ‘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.’

The star said the stark reality of Derek’s illness had only just started to hit her in the last two weeks, crediting her career as a journalist for allowing her to deal with difficult situations in a calm manner.   

She said: ‘Very early on, I spoke to Piers [Morgan] and he said, ‘Right, come on Garraway, you’re a journalist this is the story of your life. You’re focused on Derek, you’ve got to get all the information you can.’ 

‘And that actually really helped because I thought ‘I’ve got a job’. Because we’re in free- fall. I’ve got a job – to fight for Derek, keep life safe for Darcey and Billy and that forced me into that ‘Breaking news mode’. 

‘When something awful happens and you’re on air, you need to not think about the emotion of it, you have to think about doing your job. I rode that for weeks and weeks and weeks.’

She added: ‘Then two weeks ago, I crashed, because you can’t stay like that forever. I have huge hope and massive positivity and I’ll never give up on that, because Derek’s the core of my life and our lives. 

‘But at the same time, I have absolute uncertainty, mum, dad sisters, and the doctors don’t know because they’ve never seen this before.  

‘One doctor said this to me he is the worst affected person he’s had to treat that’s lived. This is an evil virus.’ 

‘I don’t want to scare people, Derek’s situation is extremely rare, some of the damage he’s got, hes only one of five people they have seen it in.

‘I was praying, please don’t let him die. We think of COVID as you live, mercifully, or die. More and more people are living but with completely unforeseen consequences.

‘I can’t thank all of the doctors and nurses who have been involved with this.’ 

‘It is an absolute miracle he’s still here. If I could just have one more and he could just make that next step…. 

 Kate was inundated with support from fans who lauded her bravery for speaking openly about Derek’s condition on television, with GMB host Susanna Reid, Laura Tobin, Lorraine Kelly and Georgia Toffolo tweeting in support of her.

Back in April it was revealed that Derek had been hospitalised with COVID-19 while Kate and their children isolated at home after she displayed ‘mild symptoms.’ 

Just days before, the presenter voiced her fears on Good Morning Britain after meeting with Prince Charles before he tested positive for coronavirus.

She spoke about their encounter live on air, revealing that the pair had got ‘relatively close’ at the Prince’s Trust Awards on March 11.

Kate’s spokesperson told MailOnline: ‘Kate’s husband, Derek Draper, has been taken to hospital and is being treated in intensive care with a confirmed case of COVID-19.

‘He was admitted on Monday and has since tested positive for the virus.

‘Kate, hasn’t been tested, however she has also been displaying mild symptoms, also since Monday, and as a result has been on strict isolation with her children at home.’ 

Shortly after Kate met Prince Charles on March 11, GMB played footage of the two together.

The presenter pointed out: ‘We’re relatively close there, as indeed were all the other people that were involved in that.

Kate has kept followers updated throughout Derek’s ongoing battle, taking part in the weekly Clap For Carers celebration honouring those on the frontline.        

Kate recently revealed that their son Billy, 10, sleeps by his father’s empty bed every night.

Billy is usually walked to school by Derek and misses him so much that he has made a fort on the former lobbyist’s side of the bed.  

Billy and Derek had been building a Lego Death Star from Star Wars and Billy has left it unfinished so the pair can continue when he is out of hospital.   

Derek, a psychologist, was hospitalised at the end of March after becoming breathless. 

Due to hospital hygiene rules surrounding coronavirus, his family haven’t been able to visit him.

The family FaceTime him everyday in the hopes that he will still be able to hear what they’re saying.

Although the doting father now doesn’t have Covid-19, the illness seriously damaged his major organs. 

Kate and Derek are also parents to daughter Darcey, 14, who claims she is ‘all Draper. There’s no Garraway in me’. 

Kate said: ‘There are times when I can’t bear to look around this house. It’s full of things he’s chosen, he’s trapped at the moment, in a line between living and the uncertainty of recovery, and we’re trapped with that uncertainty as well.’ 

Derek was initially taken into hospital without any other coronavirus symptoms, just breathlessness.  

However, he then rapidly deteriorated and felt like he was suffocating all the time so doctors put him into a coma.

The couple were introduced to each other by their mutual friend Gloria de Piero, a former GMTV presenter and were married in 2005. 

Just before he was put into an induced coma Derek, told Kate on the phone: ‘You have saved my life. I don’t just mean now, I mean everything. Being married to you, and the children.’ 

Doctors stopped giving Derek the drugs that put him in the coma three weeks ago but he hasn’t yet regained consciousness, although he does occasionally open his eyes. 

Kate said she never imagined she would be told her husband may be trapped in a comatose permanently.

The Good Morning Britain host described it as the ‘second level of loss’, saying even if he doesn’t die, if he doesn’t wake up she will have lost him anyway. 

The mother-of-two went on to explain how the virus has wreaked havoc on Derek’s body. 

She told how the illness ‘attacked everything’ before heartbreakingly admitting; ‘we don’t know if he can recover’.  

While he is able to breathe through a tracheotomy and the hope is everyday he will rely on the breathing support less,  an MRI scan revealed he has holes in his heart, is on kidney dialysis, has a damaged liver and pancreas and is now diabetic, which he wasn’t before.  

Kate said doctors had been trying to pull Derek out of his comatose state for the past three weeks, but he hasn’t managed to regain consciousness. 

She went on to compare watching his battle to ‘like spinning plates’, adding that should Derek recover, they are looking at ‘months of rehabilitation’.

The television star admitted at times she feels paralysed with fear, but vows to stay strong for their two children. 

Further discussing Derek’s progress, the star recalled shortly before her birthday on May 4th, Derek opened his eyes for the ‘first time’, with the presenter hopeful it was the beginning of his recovery.