Kate Garraway has opened up about her “constant sadness” over her husband Derek’s coronavirus battle.
The presenter’s husband has been in ICU since the end of March, after contracting the virus.
Speaking to YOU magazine, Kate said: “Every issue I’m dealing with I automatically think, ‘Oh, I’ll check with Derek’ and then realise I can’t.
“There’s always this sadness. That and the heartbreak are the most wearing things.”
“I see him quite infrequently, not as often as I’d wish,” she added.
“I’m always thinking how would Derek help Billy; he was so brilliant at all of that,” she said of the couple’s 11-year-old son Billy.
“I imagine all the conversations he’d be having with Derek – it’s heartbreaking to think they may never be having them again.”
“If someone said to you, ‘This is just a short-term period, you are going to get through it, then everything will get back to normal,’ you’d have such a burst of energy.
“But it’s the same for anyone living with a loved one with Covid – it’s all an unknown. It grinds you down.
“What I have to accept is I’m a de-facto single mum for now when I’ve always said I don’t know how single mums do it.”
Although Derek is technically free from the coronavirus, the illness wreaked havoc on his body – and doctors have told Kate that he may “never recover”.
She gave an update of her husband’s situation on her return to Good Morning Britain in July.
“It’s a strange word coma, he was induced which was what they were doing then because it was a way of resting the lungs, of course they’re no longer keeping him in the coma but he’s not fully awake,” she said.
“There’s two types of coma, there’s the one we think of as vegetative coma, and the one Derek is in which is a minimum station of consciousness, wonderfully his eyes are open but we have no real knowledge of what he can see or hear.”
“It is a very desperate situation, it’s very very difficult, of course there’s fantastic hope he’s still alive, the doctors do keep saying it’s a miracle he’s still alive,” she continued.
“Six times they said he’s not going to make it, and obviously you couldn’t visit…”
“So he’s been very very sick, but it’s a new disease, there’s no data, so what they can say is it’s great he’s here.”
“There’s flickers of hope, his lungs are starting to recover, his kidneys are doing better, his liver, but they don’t know how much better he can get.”
Kate and Derek tied the knot back in 2005, and the couple share two children – Darcey, 14, and Billy, 11.
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