I promised I'd save you and bring you home and I will.. just hang in there 'd d ust e

Published date22 March 2021
Date22 March 2021
Some may have noticed her usual smile seemed slightly forced, that some emotion lay just under the surface, even a hint of exhaustion.

If they did nobody could blame Kate, because behind the immaculate make-up and polished performance she was reeling from one of the worst nights of her life.

Just hours earlier, Derek Draper, her beloved husband of 16 years who had spent months in intensive care battling the effects of coronavirus, had told her he feared he could not go on.

Kate said: "Derek had been drifting in and out of consciousness and when he said that, it was absolutely devastating, but it showed me he was still in there. Even though it was terrible to think his spirits were so low."

That evening last November, Kate had called the hospital so a nurse could set up the iPad for one of her regular FaceTime conversations with 53-year-old Derek.

She knew he could not always find the strength to speak but this time he did. And his words were distressing.

In Finding Derek, a documentary on STV tomorrow, we hear Derek saying: "Kate, there's no way out. There's no way out.

"I've got to the point where I just think f*** it. Just f*** it."

"As in die?" she asks, before his desperate and tearful response: "Yes... I don't know how to cope. I don't know how to cope."

It would have been easy to dismiss it as a momentary lapse but not for Kate, 53, the woman the nation has watched and marvelled at as she coped with her life being shattered.

At that moment, Kate shows her mettle yet again, refusing to give up on the man she loves, the father of her two children Darcey, 15, and Billy, 11. She vowed to save him.

"You don't know how to cope with it. OK," she tells him. "I know you feel like you're trapped in your head and it's terrifying.

"But you're coming home, you're coming back to your life and you will be the person, even better than you were before. You will be.

"I will find a way to make it better. I promised you that I would save you and I'm going to save you, I will find a way, you just have to hang in there."

Viewers will then see Kate bring Derek back from the brink.

For hours she stays on her iPad, talking to him, staying with him through the night, reassuring him the next morning as she gets her earlymorning taxi to work.

When she is HAPPY Derek and due to go on air, Kate asks Derek's nurses to put GMB on so he could see her face in the hours they could not speak.

Kate said: "After that call, it was then time to go into GMB and go on air, having been up all...

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