Kimmel makes plea for health care
Comedian tearfully recounts newborn son’s heart surgery
A tearful Jimmy Kimmel turned his show’s monologue into an emotional recounting of his newborn son’s open-heart surgery — and a plea that all U.S. 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 as he detailed how his son’s routine birth last week suddenly turned frightening.
Hours after his wife, Molly, gave birth April 21 to William John, a “very attentive” nurse at CedarsSinai 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 a heart problem.
“It’s a very terrifying thing,” he said. He was surrounded at the hospital by very worried-looking people, “kind of like right now,” he told the audience, one of the jokes he managed despite choking up.
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.
Billy will have another openheart 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 a speech on health care.
He criticized U.S. 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.