KATE Garraway has been warned a “good recovery” for her husband Derek Draper would mean that he can “hold a hairbrush on his own”.
The TV presenter, 53, 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 explains in her book The Power of Hope, which is being serialised in the Daily Mail.
She writes that electrical tests had 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.”
Yesterday Kate revealed her sick husband was almost left paralysed by a rare brain inflammation.
She explained in her new book that there were “fluffy white clouds floating in the top part of his head” after doctors found a small bleed on the brain.
Kate wrote in her book: “This, they told me, was a unique historical event, a one-off splurge of inflammation, and the fact that it showed up in some form on the earlier CT scans from back in April meant it happened right at the start when Derek was first on ECMO [life support].”
Doctors warned Kate that if the infection reached spinal cord or brain stem his ability to move would have been affected.
His condition was so rare that medics hadn’t seen the inflamation caused by Covid in the UK. Others in Europe had reported similiar cases.
Kate said this week Derek can still barely talk nearly a month after being back with her and their two children Darcey and Billy.
She has praised her children as her “heroes” for adapting so well as their dad continues to recover.
Speaking on Radio 2 to Zoe Ball this week, she said: “He isn’t really able to speak at the moment so he can’t tell them off.
“I have to be the bad guy! They are my heroes.
“They know instinctively how to talk to him but not ask too much from him.”
She said Derek, also 53, needs “24-hour care” but added: “The hope is he will be able to progress.”
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