‘It was a disaster’: Arnold Schwarzenegger says he faced near-death situation during open heart surgery
I woke up and all of a sudden the doctors were in front of me saying, ‘I’m so sorry, but it was unlike what we planned'," Arnold Schwarzenegger recalled
Arnold Schwarzenegger has spoken up about his terrifying experience on the operating table, where he faced a near-death situation during an open heart surgery. “I remember when I had my open heart surgery, the third one, which was just a few years ago just before we started ‘Terminator 6,'” the 76-year-old actor recalled in a YouTube video. “I was really freaking out. I woke up and all of a sudden the doctors were in front of me saying, ‘I’m so sorry, but it was unlike what we planned.'”
Arnold claimed that the simple procedure became complicated when his medical team “made a mistake and poked through the heart wall.” The actor recalled how doctors “had to open [him] up very quickly to save [his] life” because of internal bleeding.
‘I was in the middle of a disaster’
Arnold, however, was determined not to lose hope. “The bottom line is, you cannot roll the clock back. It was a disaster. I was in the middle of a disaster,” he said. “So now, how do I get out of it? You have to shift gears. Collect yourself, shift gears and say, ‘OK, what I need to do now is get out of this hospital.”
Arnold gradually began walking 10 steps a day, and then taking daily walks around the hospital. “I even called my buddies in and I said, ‘You guys have to fire me up,'” he said, as the video reveals footage of hum walking along the corridors with friends and family.
“I looked like an idiot waddling around in the hallways, but the bottom line was I was getting going because the doctors said you have to exercise your lungs because if you get pneumonia you can die,” Arnold said.
Arnold’s will power led him to slowly recover at home and prepare to start filming ‘Terminator: Dark Fate.’ “I wanted to get really going with the exercise, get out of the hospital as quick as possible, and then get going with the training again,” Arnold said. “I had to be in shape, I had to move around, run around, lift things up, do the fight scenes.”
Most recently, Arnold appeared in the action-comedy television series 'FUBAR,' which premiered on Netflix on May 25. The show starred him in his first leading role in a scripted live-action television series. The series was a joint production of Skydance Television and Blackjack Films.
