Kimmel tearfully recounts newborn son’s heart surgery
LOS ANGELES A tearful Jimmy Kimmel turned his show’s monologue into an emotional recounting of his newborn son’s openheart surgery — and a plea that all American families get the life-saving medical care they need.
“It was a scary story and before I go into it, I want you to know it has a happy ending,” Kimmel assured ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” studio audience Monday.
Several hours after his wife, Molly, gave birth April 21 to William John, a “very attentive” nurse at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center alerted the couple and doctors to the baby's purple-ish colour and an apparent heart murmur, the host said.
The baby's lack of oxygen was either due to a lung problem or, worst-case scenario, heart disease, Kimmel said, and it was determined to be the latter.
“It’s a very terrifying thing,” he said.
A sonogram showed his son was born with holes in the wall separating the right and left sides of the heart and a blocked pulmonary valve, Kimmel said. The baby, nicknamed Billy, was taken by ambulance to Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles to undergo surgery to open the valve.
“The longest three hours of my life,” Kimmel said.
Billy will have another open-heart surgery within six months to repair the openings and then a third procedure when he's a young teen, but he came home six days after the surgery and is “doing great,” Kimmel said.
After thanking by name the nurses, doctors and staff at the two hospitals, along with his colleagues and friends the comedian then gave an impassioned speech on health care.
He criticized President Donald Trump’s proposed cuts to the National Institutes of Health and praised Congress for instead calling for increased funding.
“If your baby is going to die and it doesn’t have to, it shouldn’t matter how much money you make . ... Whether you; re a Republican or a Democrat or something else, we all agree on that, right?” he said.