Jeffrey R. Holland Raises His Wife From the Dead

After Sister Holland’s last miscarriage some years ago, there were some complications that developed and she went in for a routine examination to prepare for the aftermath of this miscarriage. Not a little miscarriage; it was a tragic and rending miscarriage of a child in the child’s seventh month. And when she went in to the hospital, something went wrong.

They introduced a dye to trace some of her organs and some of the circulation and to see exactly now what needed to be dealt with. They introduced an iodine-based dye to which she reacted, and we don’t know to this hour whether it was bad dye or whether she is, in fact, allergic. We’ve never tried it again because we’re assuming that there might have been an allergy there, and those are things you don’t know until you face it the first time.

But this dye was introduced and she instantly, within a millimeter of a second, went into anaphylactic shock. And by and large, you don’t survive anaphylactic shock. Anaphylactic shock is when the body reacts as if it were dead and everything stops; all the vital functions stop. Now fortunately, the heart is the last to stop, but the kidneys and all the support mechanism—and great difficulty with the lungs and the immediate effect on the heart—Sister Holland was dying.

She was 37 years old and she had a husband who was loony about her then and loony about her now and loony about her forever, and she had three little children at home. And she called out on the emergency room table. I was told later that if they had had to transport her from the examination room—the x-ray room where the dye was introduced—the good fortune of that particular hospital in Salt Lake was that fortunately the emergency room was next door. That might not happen in any other hospital in America, but the emergency room was next door to the x-ray room where she’d begun to undertake this test. They said if they’d have had to take her farther than that, they would have lost her; they’d have never made the move from one room to the other to get her this intensive critical care that was going to battle now to save her life.

Somewhere in the haze of a coma she said, “Call my husband.” She said, “Call my husband. I need a blessing.” They called me. I was the Commissioner of Education at the time to which Brother Shumway’s referred. I was several miles away—some miles away from the hospital. The only thing the nurse could say in a frenzied voice is, “You better come. Your wife is calling for you. We’re doing all we can do.”

Now I don’t know whether you can comprehend what it’s like to be sitting in a meeting, going about your business, sitting in a classroom, lunchroom—pick a spot—and have somebody call and say about the person you love more than anyone in this world, in time or eternity, “You better come. We’re doing all we can.” I literally screamed back through the telephone, “What do you mean? What do you mean you’re doing all you can? What do you mean?” And they said, “Your wife is in anaphylactic shock and you must get here quickly.”

I ran out of the room. I knocked over chairs and tables. The secretaries thought someone had been killed. I said no. I ran to get in the car. I drove a hundred miles an hour down the middle of Salt Lake City, literally. I was trying to get some police officer to stop me or to come along, believing that I could get there faster if I could get a police escort. I was an absolute wild man.

I got there and I got into the emergency room and she was not breathing. A nurse was up in her face slapping her, literally up on her hands and knees. Now she’s on this emergency room table and here’s a little 90-pound nurse up on her hands and knees kneeling on this table slapping my wife as hard as a 90-pound nurse can hit, saying, “Breathe! Now you breathe!” And there would be these terrific, terrible long pauses where she was not breathing and there was no lung and respiratory action and that heart getting weaker and weaker.

And the doctor in the emergency room says, “We’re doing all we can do.” And he said her pulse and her heart rate is 70 over 20. Now I don’t know the medical implications of that, but I think you’re dead if it’s 90 over 30 and she was down to 70 over 20 with no rate, no pulse, no breathing, no heart, no power.

And I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know whether any of you are LDS and I appreciate everything you’re doing, but I must ask you to leave the room. And I’m here to give her a blessing and I have to do it now. And forgive me if this is the wrong medical procedure and not something you would suggest.” And I just shoved some doctors out of the way and moved this little nurse and knocked some tubes and I don’t know—I think I’ve keeled over an IV or two and an oxygen tank and whatever—but I place my hands on her head.

And the minute I said, “Patricia Terry Holland, in the name of Jesus Christ”—that’s as far as I got. When I said, “Patricia Terry Holland, in the name of Jesus Christ,” she started to breathe. Her chest started to move. I could feel the respiration. I could just see this little faint glimmer and movement of her lips. Color—color paler than that manila folder which has my talk in it that I’m not going to give. And she started to breathe and I pronounced a blessing and commanded her to live. I commanded her to live in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ for my sake and for our children’s sake and I said, “You cannot go. We cannot live without you now. We cannot survive in our home if you leave us.”

And of course we do that. I closed—as hard as it was—I closed through a prayer that I don’t need to detail here. I closed saying to the Lord that His will had to be done. I’ve been in the Church and have known the gospel long enough to know that you have to do that. You can’t do the wrong thing, and the wrong thing is whatever’s not His will. But I certainly made known what our will was—that if anybody was interested in our opinion, I was going to tell him.

And she started to breathe—not terrifically regularly—but at least she was breathing. Some respiration, some little sense of breath coming from her lips and a touch of color starting to come back. And of course the long and the short of the story is it took 48 hours. Her kidneys didn’t start working again for 48 hours—that alone could have been fatal. All the side effects and spin-offs of this were quite apart from whether she was going to breathe and keep her heart beating. And so we weren’t out of the woods yet, but that’s a story for another day.

-From an address given at BYU-Hawaii November 18, 1993