Schwarzenegger details challenging recovery from open heart surgery

Arnold Schwarzenegger is thinking back on a very trying period in his life when he unexpectedly underwent open heart surgery and only had a few months to heal and get back in shape.

The 76-year-old actor and bodybuilder described a terrifying occurrence in early 2018 when he was scheduled to have minimally invasive heart surgery in a video recently uploaded to his YouTube channel as part of his health and fitness organization, “Arnold’s Pump Club.”

“I remember when I had my open heart surgery, my third one… I was really freaking out, and I woke up all of the sudden and the doctor was standing in front of me, and saying ‘I’m so sorry, but unlike what we planned, a non-invasive surgery… we made a mistake and poked through the heart wall, and there was internal bleeding, and we had to open you up to save your life.’” Schwarzenegger recalled.

“The bottom line is, you cannot roll the clock back,” he continued. “I was in the middle of a disaster… so now it’s about, ‘how do I get out of it?’ You have to shift gears.”

According to Schwarzenegger, he came to the realization that the first stage of rehabilitation was becoming well enough to be released from the hospital.

“[That meant] getting out of bed and start walking. First 10 steps, then longer and longer,” he explained, adding that when he needed extra motivation, “I called my buddies in and said, ‘You guys have to fire me up. You have to count the number of steps that I’m doing”.

“And this is what we did, everyday. Everybody came into the hospital, They said, ‘OK, Arnold, it’s time to get up!’” Schwarzenegger recalled. “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.”

“Because three months later, I started with Terminator 6,” he said, referring to Terminator: Dark Fate, which was set to start shooting after multiple delays. “So I had to be in shape, I had to be able to move around, run around, lift things up, do the fight scene, all these things.”

Schwarzenegger revealed behind-the-scenes video of himself practicing on exercise equipment after leaving the hospital as he pondered on his rehabilitation process.

“And I did it! Because I had a positive attitude and knew exactly how I was going to get there,” he explained. “[And] I had the support system, because none of this we can do by ourselves… When I started shooting Terminator 6, I was all back together again.