Kate Garraway says Derek Draper is battling ‘life-threatening’ sepsis

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Kate Garraway has revealed that her husband, Derek Draper, has returned to hospital after being diagnosed with “life-threatening” sepsis.

Draper, 54, has been severely unwell since testing positive for coronavirus in March 2020 and despite no longer having the virus today, has suffered from long-lasting organ damage.

Speaking on Good Morning Britain on Monday, the TV presenter explained why she had been absent from the programme for the past three weeks.

“I dramatically disappeared and haven’t been here for three weeks now... We were on air and Derek had come out of hospital, he’s been going in and out of hospital for a while for looking at ways to tackle the damage caused by Covid back in 2020,” Garraway said.

“But we haven’t really had any sort of medical eruptions, and then he just was really unwell.

“He’d come out of hospital the day before and [I] got a phone call from the person who was looking after him saying, ‘right, we’re really worried’, so I whizzed home, and it just sort of went ‘boom’ from there.”

The presenter went on to say that they later discovered Draper had “very severe sepsis, life-threatening sepsis”.

She added: “So it was really dramatic; brilliant work by the A&E, absolutely extraordinary because when you’ve got sepsis, the big challenge is [to] find the source of infection quickly and get the right antibiotics and his blood pressure was so low...”

Now, Garraway explained that Draper is doing better but there is an issue with his kidneys.

“I did wonder if it was a urine infection but weirdly, we couldn’t get anything for a sample and they just went ‘kidneys’?” she said.

“And it was one of those questions that was so different from all the technical, it’s just like ‘what was in your mind?’ and I said that and it made them look at each other [and] say kidneys and unfortunately his kidneys were really badly infected, blocked.

“The challenge now is to save them, so that’s where we’ve been for the last three weeks.

“He’s still in hospital, not in intensive care, waiting for another procedure, looking really good.

“So fingers crossed on everything and particularly one kidney looking really good, just need to look at the other one, and so yeah, he’s still in [a] high dependency [unit].”

Additional reporting by PA.