Kate Garraway was told Derek Draper was ‘unlikely to recover’ if he didn’t make progress within two years

KATE Garraway was told by doctors that her husband Derek would be unlikely to recover if he didn't make progress within two years.

Derek, 53, returned to the family home from hospital in April over a year after falling seriously ill with coronavirus.

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He is now conscious, but Kate recently said the illness has "devastated" him and left him unable to move.

In her new book The Power of Hope, Kate revealed how Derek's neurologist, known as Dr W, told her "there is very little chance of him making a meaningful recovery".

Dr W admitted he had never seen a case like Derek's, so he found it hard to predict an outcome for him.

The former political adviser spent months in a coma and the effects of the virus ravaged his organs.

On multiple occasions Kate was told to expect the worst, and Derek's heart has stopped on more than once.

Recalling her conversations with Dr W, Kate said: "How long before you know more? Not how long will it take for him to recover, because you don’t know if he can even recover, but how long before you might know more?

"After another long pause, he looked straight at me, then away. 'Well, Kate' – the first time he had used my name – 'I think it’s fair to say if he is still like this after two years we will know there is very little chance of him making any meaningful recovery.'

"'TWO YEARS!' I screamed inside my head.

"Up until now I had been living by the minute, hours on the phone monitoring infection levels and statistics, trying to get a handle on where Derek was, wondering every time I went to sleep if he would still be alive in the morning.

"How could I go on like this for another two years? Worse still, how could Derek be trapped like this for two years? The timescale winded me and I’m sure I must have slumped a bit in the chair."

An intensive-care specialist warned that Derek might never be the person he was again.

He urged her to be strong and to give the medics time to do their work.

Kate wrote: "I sensed they were trying to wrap things up. But I couldn’t take in what they were saying. I wanted space to take it in. I didn’t want to wrap up on this level of bleakness."