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Kimmel recounts baby son’s 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 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 as he detailed how his son’s routine birth April 21 suddenly turned frightening.

Several hours after his wife, Molly, gave birth to William John, a “very attentive” nurse at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center alerted the couple and doctors to the baby’s purple-ish color and an apparent heart murmur, the host said.

The baby’s lack of oxygen was due to a lung problem, Kimmel said. “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 and having to pause at times.

A test showed his son had a birth defect called tetralogy of Fallot with pulmonary atresia: a hole in the wall separating the right and left sides of the heart and a blocked pulmonary valve, Kimmel said. The baby 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. His son will have another open-heart surgery within six months to repair the hole and then a third procedure when he’s a young teen, but he is “doing great,” said Kimmel, who is taking the rest of the week off.

EVAN AGOSTINI/INVISION Jimmy Kimmel, shown with his wife, Molly McNearney, says their son was born April 21 with a heart defect.