Molly McNearney had an uneventful pregnancy. No tests revealed anything abnormal and no doctors detected anything wrong. “It caught them by surprise,” Dr. Vaughn A. Starnes explained on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in June 2024. “They thought Billy was going to be perfectly normal.” That remained true even after birth. On April 21, 2017, McNearney and Jimmy Kimmel welcomed a seemingly healthy baby boy. The birth was uncomplicated — Billy came out after six pushes, and everyone was happy about the health of the newborn.
McNearney was taken to the recovery room, where she and Kimmel introduced Billy to his 2-year-old sister, Jane. “We were happy; everything was good,” Kimmel said in a “Jimmy Kimmel Live” monologue. It wasn’t until about three hours later that a nurse noticed Billy was a bit purplish and that he had a heart murmur. Billy was taken to the NICU, where doctors later identified he had been born with tetralogy of Fallot with pulmonary atresia, a severe condition that can affect five different parts of the heart.
Three days later, Billy underwent a three-hour open-heart surgery to fix one of his two defects. “That has got to be the most scary, terrifying thing that a parent goes through,” Starnes, who performed the operation, said on “GMA.” Six days after the successful operation, McNearney and Kimmel brought Billy home. “He’s doing great. He’s eating, he’s sleeping. He peed on his mother today,” Kimmel said at the time.
