Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel provided a health update about his 7-year-old son Billy after Billy’s third open heart surgery.
Kimmel took to Instagram on Sunday to share a long message detailing his son’s operation and thanked the medical team for their work. Read More
“This weekend, our boy Billy had his third (of three, we hope) open heart surgery. We went into this experience with a lot of optimism and nearly as much fear and came out with a new valve inside a happy, healthy kid,” wrote Kimmel.
Kimmel garnered a lot of attention in 2017 when he tearfully recounted on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” the terrifying moment he learned about his son’s heart defect.
“They did an echocardiogram, which is a sonogram of the heart, and found that Billy was born with a heart disease,” Kimmel said on-air.
Doctors diagnosed Billy’s condition as Tetralogy of Fallot and, at just 3 days old, he had open heart surgery to repair it.
“The pulmonary valve was completely blocked, and he has a hole in the wall between the left and right sides of his heart,” Kimmel said of the condition at the time.
Seven months later, after a second heart surgery, when Kimmel gave the world an update on his son’s health, he took the opportunity to speak out on the fight for affordable healthcare.
“No parent should ever have to decide if they can afford to save their child’s life,” Kimmel said on his show. “It just shouldn’t happen. Not here.”
In the recent Instagram post, Kimmel also recognized and thanked his wife Molly for being “stronger than is reasonable for any mom.”
He also thanked the team at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles for their “immeasurable kindness and expertise.”
