Thread by @thesundaytimes

Presenter @kategarraway’s husband, Derek Draper, has been in hospital since last March after catching coronavirus. She spoke to @DeccaJourno about the ordeal thetimes.co.uk/article/kate-g…

The last time I saw Kate Garraway she had just returned in triumph from the I’m a Celebrity jungle, writes @DeccaJourno. Draper talked about their son Billy’s slight difficulty in adjusting to a new primary school

What he said next has lived with me to this day, says @DeccaJourno. “I’d have to say,” he reflected, “it’s the worst thing that has ever happened to us.” Eleven weeks later, on March 30 last year, an ambulance would race Draper to hospital with Covid

Fighting for breath, he was placed into an induced coma on a ventilator. “It’s only for three or four days,” Garraway reassured him

Twelve months later, her husband is still in intensive care. The doctors still don’t understand why Covid had such a devastating effect on Draper

Garraway endured “months and months of horror, of live-or-die phone calls”. Time and again, the hospital told her: “Prepare yourself, he’s going to die”

Somehow he clung on, and in July the doctors withdrew the drugs inducing his coma – but the worst was still to come. Draper did not regain consciousness

Her voice drops. “I don’t know if he’ll ever have any kind of life again. We just don’t know.”

Read the full interview thetimes.co.uk/article/kate-g…