Kate Garraway has made an emotional return to Good Morning Britain, amid her husband’s fight to recover from coronavirus.
The presenter has been off screen since seriously ill Derek Draper was hospitalised in March after contracting the virus.
Kate said it was “like coming out of a little bubble of sadness” as she joined colleagues Susanna Reid and Piers Morgan on Wednesday morning.
Revealing she was feeling “really emotional”, she said: “As soon as I walked in I thought, ‘Oh god, this is no good, I’m gonna cry now, hold it together.’
“It’s so lovely to see your faces, it’s lovely to be back, it’s like coming out of a little bubble of sadness. It’s just so strange to still be in the situation.”
Kate also confirmed she’ll be making a more permanent return to the ITV breakfast show to cover for Piers and Susanna when they go on their annual summer break next week.
She said: “It’s life, it’s livelihood, it’s fear and anxiety, I have got to get on and do the things I’m good at. I’m going to come back on Monday, if you’ll have me, you two are going. I’ve not quite got the fight to be a Piers Morgan but I’m gonna be with Ben Shephard.
“The doctors have said I’ve got to get on, they’ve been worried about me.”
Although she revealed at the weekend her husband was out of his induced coma, Kate said he is still “desperately” ill and in a “minimal state of consciousness”, with doctors telling her they’ve never treated anyone so sick.
She said: “His eyes are opening but we have no knowledge of what he can see or hear.
“It’s a very desperate situation, it’s very difficult and of course there’s fantastic hope he is still alive... the doctors keep saying it is a miracle he’s still alive.”
She continued: “I was speaking to somebody yesterday, a doctor who has treated him in two hospitals and he said, ‘He’s as sick as anyone I’ve ever seen in 35 years of medicine, never mind Covid, and some of those people are no longer here.’
“It’s great that he’s here, there’s flickers of hope, his lungs are starting to recover, his kidneys and liver are doing better but they don’t know how much better he can get and there’s nothing to compare it to.”
The couple, who are both 52, married in 2005 and have a 14-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son, Darcey and William.
Good Morning Britain airs weekdays at 6am on ITV.