i have a story to tell about something that happened to our family last week. i'm sorry. you know, i try not to get
Android TV john lewis, emotional, but it was a scary story. and before i go into it, i want you to know it has a happy
ending. okay? so when i'm telling this, don't get too upset. leave that to me. but a little over a week ago on friday, april 21st, my wife, molly, gave birth to a boy. a baby boy.
his name is william john kimmel. [ cheers and applause ] thank you very much. we call him billy. it was an easy delivery. six pushes, he was out. and he appeared to be a normal healthy baby. until about three hours after he
was born. we were out of the delivery room. we moved to the recovery room. our whole family was there. and we introduced him to his 2 1/2-year-old sister. she was cute with him. we were happy.
everything was good. my wife was in bed relaxing. and when a very attentive nurse at cedars-sinai hospital. her name is nanuzh. was checking him out and heard a murmur in his heart, which is common with newborn babies, but she also noticed he was a bit
purple, which is not common. so she asked me to come with her. and my wife and i assumed it would be nothing. our daughter had a heart murmur too. we didn't notice that he wasn't the color he was supposed to be.
so i accompanied billy and the nurse, went down the hall to another part of the hospital. the neonatal icu where another excellent nurse named ann checked him out and called the doctor. and 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 understand -- or understood at the time was most likely one of two things, either his heart or
his lungs. and you hope it's the lungs because sometimes they have fluid in them after delivery and it's potentially a minor thing. but they did an x-ray and his lungs were fine, which meant his heart wasn't. so now more doctors and nurses
and he quit -- it's a terrifying thing. you know, my wife is back in the recovery room. she has no idea what's going on. and i'm standing in the middle of a lot of very worried-looking people kind of like right now. [ laughter ]
who are trying to figure out what the problem is. it's friday night. and so they call a pediatric cardiologist, dr. eben zahn, who when they called him was picking his mother up from the airport. luckily, her plane was not delayed because he got to the
hospital very quickly. they did an echocardiogram, which is a sonogram of the heart, and found that billy was born with a heart disease. something called tetralogy of fallot with pulmonary atresia. 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. and then they brought my wife in and they wheeled her in and dr. zahn told her what was going on and what our options were, and we decided to take him to
children's hospital, where there's a world-renowned cardiac surgeon who is by all accounts a genius. his name is dr. vaughn starnes. we put the baby in an ambulance to children's hospital los angeles. and on monday morning dr.
starnes opened his chest and fixed one of the two defects in his heart. he went in there with a scalpel and did some kind of magic that i couldn't even begin to explain. he opened the valve, and the operation was a success.
it was the longest three hours of my life. they didn't do everything. he'll have to have another open heart surgery in three to six months to close those holes. but they want to wait until he's bigger, and even he'll have a third hopefully non-invasive
procedure sometime maybe in his early teens to replace the valve he has now. so this poor kid, this is what he looked like on monday. but this is what he looked like yesterday. we brought him home. poor kid.
not only do you get a bad heart, he got my face. six days after open heart surgery we got to bring him home, which is amazing. he's doing great. he's eating. he's sleeping. he peed on his mother today
while she was changing his diaper. [ applause ] he's doing all the things that he's supposed to do. and our daughter -- here's a picture of my wife and me and billy and our daughter jane. and you can see jane's pretty
excited about having another kid in the house. you know, it's funny. they tell you when you bring the new baby home bring a gift for the older sibling and tell her it's from the baby. as if we gave birth to the easter bunny or something.
it makes no sense. but that's what they tell you to do. so we brought jane these shopkins. do you know what these are? they're like tiny little cupcakes and donuts with faces on them.
and we said billy bought these for you. and she believed it. she's not too bright. i mean, he doesn't even have money. not only -- doesn't he have money. he doesn't have a place to put
he has no wallet. how would he buy these for her? as far as she knows, the baby is signed up for amazon prime. but she likes him okay. this is another picture. this is the best. there's me in a coma. and i have a list of people i
want to thank for making that happen. and i hope i have my list. these are just some of the people who played a part in this. it was an enormous team effort. really was. at cedars-sinai hospital first
of all i want to thank na nanush shakernia, the nurse who was the first to notice there was a problem. if it was a girl, we would have named her nanush. we really would have. and the other nurses at cedars. desiree, laurie, ashley,
theresa, susan, alexis. the head nurse in intensive care ann de mayo, who's great. nurse joan bacall, who was at his side the whole time. dr. eben zahn. and also his mother, who probably didn't get her luggage because he picked her up at the
airport. dr. scott cohen, dr. stacy rosenbaum, dr. tim casares. all for being so great. and the truly awe-inspiring team at children's hospital los angeles led by dr. vaughn starnes, who saves so many lives.
this man has saved thousands of lives and turned so much sorrow into happiness. i'll never be able to thank him for -- so i won't even try. and all the great doctors at chla. dr. sylvia del castillo. dr. erin abarbanel.
barbara gross who runs the heart institute. and our unbelievably kind and caring nurses, especially krista callan and carrie dublin. but they were all so excellent. ellese, josie, rhea. dr. donald seaback, our respiratory therapist who kept
billy breathing the whole time. this is some place children's hospital los angeles. i hope you never have to go there, but if you do you'll see so many kids from so many financial backgrounds being cared for so well and with so much compassion.
i've been supporting children's hospital for years. i had no idea we'd ever wind up there. and if you'd like to support the work they do, the information is there at the bottom of your screen. please do.
we were on the costco floor, which i consider to be a good omen because it's my favorite store. and that's -- costco sponsors the second floor, which is great. and thanks to all the companies who support children's hospital,
including my company, disney abc, which supports them financially. i want to thank everyone here at abc who were exceptionally kind and patient with me, letting me stay out of work last week. ben sherwood, channing dungy. rod mills.
cara kennedy, bob and willow iger. especially thanks to everyone here at the show. all my co-workers who sent a box of cards. that meant a lot to my wife. i didn't read them. but they meant a lot to her.
thanks to my work -- i want to thank my work family and my actual family, starting with my cousin dr. denise hayes, who happens to be a pediatric cardiologist in new york. there's one smart person in our family. and she counseled us.
she explained everything to everyone in our family over and over again so i didn't have to. thank you, denise. and special extra thanks to my mom and dad and my mother-in-law mickey. my kids, danny and ken, my cousins, my sister, my brother,
my sisters-in-law, my brothers-in-law. they all really came through in so many ways, as did my friends. every one of my friends were there 100% of the time for us. we had atheists praying for us. we had people who did not believe in god --
-- praying to him. and i hate being -- i hate having to say it. even that son of a bitch matt damon sent flowers. so thank you. i want to say also thanks to guillermo for all the sweet texts and e-mails.
i could barely read any of them. but it was the thought that really counted. and cleto, i have to say cleto, cleto sr. cleto's mom sylvia, cleto sr.'s wife sylvia who's like a second mother to me never has any human being ever texted more praying
hands emojis to another human being than cleto's mom did to me. i had to upgrade my phone just to handle them all. so thank you, sylvia. and most of all i want to thank my wife, molly. first of all for allowing me to
have sex with her in the first place. that was huge right there. so few have done that. but also 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. i'm definitely getting a vasectomy after this. and i want to say one other president trump last month proposed a $6 billion cut in
funding to the national institute of health. and thank god our congressmen made a deal last night to not go along with that. they actually increased funding by $2 billion. and i applaud them for doing that.
because more than 40% of the people who'd have been affected by those cuts in the national institutes of health are children, and it would have a major impact on a lot of great places including children's hospital in los angeles, which is so unbelievably sad to me.
we were brought up to believe that we live in the greatest country in the world, but until a few years ago millions and millions of us had no access to health insurance at all. you know, before 2014 if you were born with congenital heart disease like my son was, there
was a good chance you'd never be able to get health insurance because you had a pre-existing condition. you were born with a pre-existing condition. and if your parents didn't have medical insurance you might not live long enough to even get
denied because of a pre-existing if your baby is going to die and it doesn't have to, it shouldn't matter how much money you make. i think that's something that whether you're a republican or a democrat or something else, we all agree on that, right? i mean, we do.
whatever your party, whatever you believe, whoever you support, we need to make sure that the people who are supposed to represent us, people who are meeting about this right now in washington, understand that very clearly. let's stop with the nonsense.
this isn't football. there are no teams. we are the team. it's the united states. don't let their partisan squabbles divide us on something every decent person wants. we need to take care of each other.
i saw a lot of families there. and no parent should ever have to decide if they can afford to save their child's life. it just shouldn't happen. not here. so anyway. thank you for listening. i promise i'm not going to cry
for the rest of the show. please say a prayer for or send positive thoughts to the families with children who are
still in the hospital now. because they need it. and thanks. we have a special show tonight.
