Jimmy Kimmel fought back tears as he spoke about how his baby son was forced to undergo emergency heart surgery within hours of being born.
The US chat show host made an emotional appeal in his opening monologue of the latest Jimmy Kimmel Live, for all families in America to get the life-saving medical care they need.
Kimmel said his wife had given birth last week to a baby boy, but told of the “longest three hours of my life”, when baby Billy had to have an operation a short time after his birth.
“It was a scary story and before I go into it, I want you to know it has a happy ending,” Kimmel assured the live audience.
He then explained an hour after his wife Molly gave birth, “a very attentive nurse” at the hospital noticed the baby was slightly purple and said she heard a heart murmur.
“It felt serious. The room started to fill up, more doctors and nurses and equipment come in and it’s a terrifying thing,” he said.
At which point Kimmel gets very emotional, and tells how after a sequence of events, doctor’s diagnosed Billy with a heart disease.
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.
on behalf of my family, thank you for the lovely and loving tweets about our son Billy and for your donations to https://t.co/HOIUvNt8WE XO
— Jimmy Kimmel (@jimmykimmel) May 2, 2017
Billy was rapidly taken by ambulance to the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles to undergo open heart surgery.
“The longest three hours of my life,” Kimmel said, adding that the operation was a “success”.
His son will have to undergo another operation within six months and then a third procedure when he’s a young teenager.
Billy came home six days after the surgery and is “doing great,” Kimmel said.
The live show host shared photos of him with his wife, their two-year-old daughter Jane and the baby.
“He is doing great. He’s eating, he’s sleeping, he peed on his mother twice,” he said.
He joked that “even that son of a b**** Matt Damon sent flowers”.
Kimmel got very emotional thanking all the doctors and nurses involved in the process, and criticised US President Donald Trump’s proposed cuts to the National Institutes of Health.
“If your baby is going to die and it doesn’t have to, it shouldn’t matter how much money you make,” he said.
“Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat or something else, we all agree on that, right?”
Washington politicians meeting on health care need to “understand that very clearly,” he added.
“This is something every decent person wants. We need to take care of each other.”
Thanks to: Entertainment News – Latest Celebrity & Showbiz News | Sky News
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