At 3:17 a.m. Pacific Time on Monday, May 27, 2024, Jimmy Kimmel did something millions of parents silently dread: he handed his seven-year-old son Billy over to a surgical team for the third open-heart surgery of the boy’s young life.
Then he did something only Jimmy Kimmel would do: he took a selfie with his groggy, thumb-up-flashing kid in pre-op, posted it to Instagram, and captioned it with the kind of raw honesty that turns a late-night comedian into a national nerve ending.
“Billy is about to go in for his third open heart surgery,” he wrote. “We went into this experience with a lot of optimism and nearly as much fear… He’s such a sweet, silly boy and we are so grateful to have him.”
Within minutes the post had a million likes. By sunrise it was five million. By the time Billy was out of the operating room, the entire country seemed to be holding its breath with the Kimmel family.
This wasn’t the first time the world had stopped for Billy Kimmel.
Born April 21, 2017, William John Kimmel came into the world purple and silent, a rare and deadly heart defect (tetralogy of Fallot with pulmonary atresia) starving his body of oxygen. Three hours after birth he was in the OR at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles for his first open-heart procedure. Three days later, Jimmy Kimmel walked onto his own stage, voice shaking, and delivered the monologue that changed late-night television forever: tears streaming, he begged America not to let children die because their parents couldn’t afford care.
Seven months later, Billy needed a second surgery. He sailed through it, chubby cheeks and all, and the nation exhaled.
For six and a half years, life almost looked normal. Billy started school. He learned to ride a bike. He developed a mischievous grin and a habit of mooning his parents when they asked him to clean his room. The scar down his chest faded to a thin white line most people never noticed.
But the patch surgeons placed over his pulmonary valve in 2017 wasn’t built to last a lifetime. Doctors always knew a third surgery was coming, probably around age seven or eight, to replace it with an adult-sized valve that could, fingers crossed, carry him into old age.
That day arrived this Memorial Day weekend.
Kimmel and his wife Molly McNearney spent the weeks leading up to it in the strange limbo every heart-family knows too well: counting down the calendar while pretending everything is fine. “We’ve been preparing him,” Kimmel told his audience the week before. “We told him he’s getting a new valve, like upgrading the engine in a car. He asked if it would make him faster. I said, ‘Buddy, you’re already the fastest kid I know.’”
Behind the jokes, the fear was real. This wasn’t a newborn emergency; this was elective in the cruelest sense of the word. They had to choose the moment to cut open their healthy, laughing child one more time.
Sunday night, the night before surgery, Kimmel posted a photo of Billy asleep on the couch, clutching a stuffed dinosaur. “Last night as a six-year-old with his original factory parts,” he wrote. The comments flooded with prayers in a dozen languages.
Monday morning, the hospital ritual: the too-big gown, the goofy anesthesia mask that smells like bubble gum, the moment the doors swing shut and the parents are left in a hallway that suddenly feels a mile long.
Then, five hours later, the update the entire internet had been refreshing for:
“He’s out of surgery and doing well!!!” Kimmel wrote at 1:42 p.m., along with the now-iconic photo: Billy in recovery, oxygen mask fogging with every breath, eyes half-open, right hand throwing a weak but unmistakable thumbs-up. “Thank you Dr. Vaughn Starnes and Dr. Jodie Votava-Smith and everyone at @ChildrensLA for taking such good care of our boy. We love you.”
The relief was visceral. Strangers wept in grocery store aisles. Other heart parents, the ones who live with this terror every day, posted their own kids’ scars and wrote, “We see you. We know.”
By Tuesday, Billy was sitting up, demanding ice cream and asking when he could go home to see his dog. Kimmel shared a video of him groggily singing the chorus to “Sweet Caroline” while nurses adjusted his IV. Normalcy, in all its ridiculous glory, was creeping back in.
In a longer note Wednesday night, Kimmel reflected on the emotional whiplash that defines their life now.
“Every time we do this I think, ‘This is the last time.’ And every time we get through it, I realize how lucky we are that there even is a ‘this time.’ Some families don’t get a third chance. Some don’t get a first.”
He ended with the line that has become the unofficial motto of the Billy Kimmel army:
“If you’re looking for a way to turn your worry into something good, please consider donating to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles or your local children’s hospital. They are the real superheroes.”
As of this writing, the latest wave of donations triggered by Billy’s surgery has already topped $400,000 and keeps climbing.
Billy will be home by the weekend, scar number three still angry and fresh, ready to heal into another badge of survival. His dad will go back to making dick jokes on television. And somewhere, a parent watching from a different ICU will see that thumbs-up photo and believe, for the first time in weeks, that their kid might make it too.
That’s the real miracle: not just that Billy’s heart keeps beating, but that every time it stumbles, it teaches the rest of us how to keep going.
