During a health scare last year, Kate Garraway revealed she felt she wasn’t doing enough to help her loved ones.
The Good Morning Britain host, 56, has been caring for her husband Derek Draper, who nearly died from Covid, for over three years.
Then, in November of last year, she awoke with a crushing ache in her chest.
Kate had gone to work despite suspicions that she was experiencing a heart attack, but was informed she needed to go to the hospital.
She has recently stated that the incident left her with an overpowering sense of guilt with which she was unable to deal.
‘I thought it was ridiculous and I don’t want to make it about my health but it was really serious, but I think it was one of those moments where I felt like I was properly failing at everything,’ she explained while appearing on This Morning on Thursday.
‘I felt like I wasn’t being a great mum because I was so stretched and that I wasn’t being the best advocate for Derek and I didn’t feel like I was doing anything right.
‘I thought I couldn’t even go on air and felt like an useless employee and it was a massive crunch moment where I thought I had to deal with it.’
However Kate added that she felt ‘so flipping lucky’ to have ‘supportive bosses’ and that she still ‘got to come into work’.
‘There are millions of people who are just in this suffocating bubble of loving the person they are caring for but also wondering how they are going to make it work.’
During the interview, Kate stated that it was understood that many carers were not coping’very well’ with the challenges they face.
‘You are in a constant state of adrenaline and wondering if every medication or prescription is the right one and consequently you feel like holding a life in hands and I’m not sure I am good enough for that and it’s too much,’ she said.
As host Holly Willoughby said: ‘Kate you are doing the best you can.’
Kate described the panic as a’searing agony in my chest’ in an excerpt from her soon-to-be-released second book, The Strength of Love.
‘It was as though someone had punched their fist through my breastbone, snatched hold of my heart and squeezed,’ she wrote.
‘The pain was sharp and excruciating. Then I realised that it wasn’t a sudden onset of pain. It had been there all the time. My temporary paralysis had distracted me.
She continued: ‘[After getting in the car] nausea swept over me, and I asked the driver to pull over. I was sick in the kerbside drain, cringing at how shameful it was.’
She ‘collapsed’ on the sofa in her dressing room after arriving at work and was ultimately persuaded to go to a neighbouring accident and emergency department with a junior producer.
She’s since said she may have been suffering from ‘stress-related angina’ or her ‘body’s response to stress in general’.
This Morning airs weekdays from 10am on ITV1.
