Jimmy Kimmel shared a new photo of his son, Billy, who has battled congenital heart disease, showing the baby smiling as he sat in a car seat with a toy giraffe.
“Young Billy is six months old today,” the Jimmy Kimmel Live host captioned the Instagram pic on Saturday, October 21. “He is healthy and happy and we are all very grateful for your prayers, good wishes, thoughts and support of @ChildrensLA and children’s hospitals in your area.”
As previously reported, an emotional Kimmel, 49, revealed on his late-night talk show in May that Billy underwent open-heart surgery shortly after he was born in April. He told the audience that three hours after his son was born, doctors noticed that the baby had a heart murmur and appeared to be purple in color. He was diagnosed with a blocked pulmonary valve and a hole in the heart wall.
“It was the longest three hours of my life,” Kimmel, who also has a 2-year-old daughter, Jane, with wife Molly McNearey, said of the life-saving surgery.
The host found himself in pulled into the controversy over the Republican party’s attempts to repeal Obamacare — and was subjected to criticism from some corners, including the hosts of Fox & Friends — after going public with Billy’s story.
“I had no idea it would become a matter of national debate,” he told Today’s Matt Lauer on Thursday, October 19.
“The reason I’m talking about this is because my son had an open-heart surgery, then has to have two more, and because of that, I learned that there are kids with no insurance in the same situation,” he said in a September monologue. “I don’t get anything out of this.”
