KATE Garraway got emotional as she revealed her sick husband Derek Draper wished her a happy birthday this morning.
The Good Morning Britain presenter, who turned 54 today, said he’s showing “fantastic” signs of getting better.
“I would say it’s miraculous but I don’t want to band that word around too much,” Kate told ITV’s Lorraine.
“He’s home and we can hug him, that’s a miracle in itself – but we’re looking for more little bits of him to come out of his consciousness and come more back to us.
“Last night I said to him ‘oh by the way it’s my birthday tomorrow’.
“He looked a bit worried, so I said ‘don’t worry I’m not expecting anything, my birthday present is you being home.’
“I said I would pop in to see him before I left in the morning.
“I came in this morning and said ‘I’m off to Lorraine, is there anything you want to say to me?’
“He said ‘oh happy birthday.’
“It makes me feel a bit emotional actually, but it’s happy tears. I sound like I’m analysing everything, but obviously that is massive. It’s wonderful that he said happy birthday because that’s what I want to hear, but also we’re looking for things he can hold [in his mind].
“I told him that the night before and had to prompt him a little bit, but he held that idea it was my birthday and then managed to repeat it out.
“That is wonderful and those signs like that are just fantastic.”
Kate added: “Every little thing is like a jigsaw piece, trying to put together a hopeful future.”
Kate last week told in her new book The Power of Hope how she’d been warned a “good recovery” for her husband was that he could “hold a hairbrush on his own”.
The 54-year-old said she felt like she’d “been shot” after the neurologist delivered the bleak prognosis when Derek was still in a coma fighting off Covid and the damage it had wreaked on his body.
“My husband’s mysterious failure to come round from his two-month induced coma had been baffling doctors for some weeks now,” Kate wrote.
Electrical tests have shown promising signs of activity in her husband’s brain – and the neurologist said a “reasonable recovery” was possible.
“This sounded promising,” she writes.
“But what, I wondered, was ‘reasonable’? Derek, back home with us being the usual Derek but maybe with a bit of a limp? In a wheelchair, with some short-term memory loss? With an inhaler, or on drugs for life?”
She continued: “His reply was a phrase that still haunts me.
“‘Being able to hold a hairbrush,’ he said.
“I felt as though I’d been shot. His words brought to mind images of damaged people sitting in institutions, one hand on a hairbrush, slowly brushing. Something like you might see in an old movie.
“It seemed a world away from anything I had ever associated
with my husband.
“Derek, brilliantly clever, mentally terrifying. My sounding board,
the yin to my yang, the inspirational father to my children.
“My love, my life.”
Derek currently needs 24-hour care after leaving hospital following his year-long fight back to health from coronavirus.
