Jimmy Kimmel Reveals 7-Year-Old Son Underwent Third Open Heart Surgery

Host Jimmy Kimmel speaks onstage during the 95th Annual Academy Awards at Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Calif., on March 12, 2023. Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Comedian Jimmy Kimmel took to Instagram on Monday to share a positive health update about his son, Billy, after the 7-year-old underwent his third open heart surgery over Memorial Day weekend.

“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,” the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” host captioned alongside a photo of Billy smiling in a hospital bed.

The 56-year-old and his wife—television writer Molly McNearney, 46—welcomed their son in April 2017. The couple, who wed in 2013, also share a 9-year-old daughter named Jane. Mr. Kimmel also has two adult children from a previous marriage.

Mr. Kimmel went on to thank “the excellent, hard-working staff, doctors, nurses, and nurse practitioners” at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA), where Billy was treated.

“Walking around this hospital, meeting parents at their most vulnerable, children in pain and the miracle workers who do everything in their considerable power to save them is a humbling experience,” he penned. “We hope you never need CHLA, but if you do—know that they help families regardless of their ability to pay, thanks largely to the Affordable Care Act (another salute to the late Senator John McCain), generous donations from companies like Disney, which I am proud to work for and especially from generous people like you.”

Mr. Kimmel concluded his post by thanking the “loving strangers who took time to pray for and send positive energy” to his son, as well as his family and friends, for their uplifting support.

“Thank you to my wife Molly for being stronger than is reasonable for any Mom to be and Billy, you are the toughest (and funniest) 7 year-old we know. There are so many parents and children who aren’t fortunate enough to go home after five days. Please share your love, hearts and prayers with them,” he added. “Nothing matters more than taking care of each other.”

Congenital Heart Disease Diagnosis

While giving a monologue on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” shortly after Billy was born, Mr. Kimmel revealed that his son had been born with a congenital heart disease.

“I have a story to tell about something that happened to our family last week,” he said at the start of the show, which aired May 1, 2017.

While fighting back tears, Mr. Kimmel shared that his son “appeared to be a normal, healthy baby.” However, about three hours after his birth at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, a nurse noticed that Billy had a heart murmur—a sound made by the abnormal blood flow through the heart valves.

Mr. Kimmel said this was common among newborn babies. “But she also noticed he was a bit purple, which is not common,” he explained, noting that his son was subsequently moved to the neonatal intensive care unit for further evaluation.

“Now all of a sudden it felt serious. And the room started to fill up. More doctors and nurses and equipment started coming in. And they determined he wasn’t getting enough oxygen into his blood, which as far as I ... understood at the time was most likely one of two things—either his heart or his lungs,” he recalled. “But they did an x-ray and his lungs were fine, which meant his heart wasn’t.”

After calling in a pediatric cardiologist, Billy received an echocardiogram—an ultrasound used to examine the heart—revealing he was born with tetralogy of Fallot with pulmonary atresia. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, the combination of rare defects, which affects about 1 out of every 2,500 babies born in the United States each year, alters the heart’s structure, impeding the flow of blood through the heart and lungs.

“It’s hard to explain, basically the pulmonary valve was completely blocked, and he has a hole in the wall between the left and right sides of his heart,” Mr. Kimmel said.

Three days later, Billy was transported via ambulance to CHLA, where he underwent his first open-heart surgery to open the pulmonary valve.

“The operation was a success; it was the longest three hours of my life,” said Mr. Kimmel, adding that Billy would have to undergo another open heart surgery in several months to close the holes in his heart, followed by a third procedure later on to replace the valve.

After thanking the staff at Cedars-Sinai and CHLA, the latter of which Mr. Kimmel shared he had been supporting for years, the television host expressed his gratitude for his wife “for being so strong and levelheaded and positive and loving during the worst nightmare a new mother could experience.”

“I couldn’t ask for a better partner. I’m so happy we had this baby together,” he added.