Jimmy Carter describes wife Rosalynn's "serious" operation

“For the last 25 years, she has had trouble with her intestines and bowels,” Jimmy Carter, 93, told several hundred people attending a free Presidents Day event at the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site in Plains. “Saturday night they operated and found the scar tissue from the old operation about fifty years ago had strangled almost two feet of her small intestine.”

The surgery went well,  but the former president endured some rocky hours along the way himself.

Doctors “didn’t give me a lot of hope before the operation was over,” Carter said. “I was deathly afraid. I prayed for three hours.

“Finally, the doctor came in about 5 o’clock on Sunday morning and told me she was gonna be OK,” Carter concluded as the crowd burst into applause.