KATE Garraway has shared the “desperate” last texts and phone calls from her husband Derek Draper before he was put into a coma.
Derek, 53, feared he would die and sent “heart-breaking” messages to his wife before he was put into an induced coma during his year-long battle against Covid.
Kate writes in her new memoir The Power of Hope, being serialised by The Mail on Sunday, that Derek quickly feared the worst in March last year when he was taken to hospital with very low oxygen levels.
As he was lifted into an ambulance, she writes that he told her: “This is not the last time you will see me. It isn’t.”
And she reflects “he would never have said that if at least a small part of him hadn’t been wondering if it was”.
Over the next few days, Kate said she truly feared husband was going to die.
In one heartbreaking phone call, he told her: “I want you at the funeral.”
Kate’s book, The Power Of Hope, reveals examples of her husband’s texts from hospital.
She writes: “His messages became more and more desperate.
“They were heart-breaking to read.”
The Good Morning Britain presenter, 53, recently welcomed Derek home after he battled Covid in hospital for over a year.
Doctors said that Derek had been “universally affected” — meaning his lungs, heart, kidneys, liver and pancreas had all been hit by Covid.
At his worst, hospital staff feared Derek may remain in a semi-vegetative state forever.
Yesterday Kate shared her reaction to the news that Britain is “going from a pandemic to an endemic” amid her husband’s Covid battle after he became the country’s longest Covid patient.
Yesterday, Kate spoke to Good Morning Britain’s Dr Amir Khan on the ITV show this morning after it was revealed that the vaccine jab roll out has slashed Covid infections by 90 per cent.
The virus has now dropped to the third biggest killer in England for the first time in six months as millions of Brits have now received their first and second jab doses.
Hearing that expert Sarah Walker, professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at Oxford and chief investigator on survey, said Britain had “moved from a pandemic to an endemic situation”, left Kate jubilant.
She said: “This is extraordinary news.”
The mum-of-two added: “It’s the news we’ve been waiting for, surely?
“They’re saying Britain has moved from a pandemic to an endemic, its going to make people think, ‘oh thank God is this VE day, is it all over?'”
Show medic Dr Amir Khan replied: “Hopefully we are turning the tide on this.
“We still need to take caution, we’ve seen in India what happens when you lift restrictions too quickly or you don’t have any restrictions at all.
“The vaccine is really good in bringing down the virus, but I wouldn’t say we’re yet out of (a pandemic) yet.”
Seven million people watched Kate’s documentary Finding Derek last month, after the star’s husband represented millions affected by the pandemic in Britain.
Kate said about his Covid battle on GMB this week: “I think it reflects a whole group of people going through this.
“Not just people like Derek with Covid, but all sorts of things, long term illnesses that families are living with and the effect it has on family life. I thought I got it before, but I get it now.”
