Arnold Schwarzenegger opened up about his near-death experience on the operating table.
“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 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.'”
The 76-year-old explained that what was supposed to be a simple non-invasive procedure became more complicated when his medical team “made a mistake and poked through the heart wall.”
Schwarzenegger added that they “had to open [him] up very quickly to save [his] life” due to internal bleeding.
Despite the setback, the former governor of California was determined to get back on his feet as soon as possible.
“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.'”
Schwarzenegger’s recovery slowly progressed from walking 10 steps a day to taking daily strolls around the hospital.
“I even called my buddies in and I said, ‘You guys have to fire me up,'” he recalled, while footage showed the star making his way through 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.”
With positivity and perseverance, he was able to continue his recovery at home in time to prepare to begin filming 2019’s “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,” the former bodybuilder explained. “I had to be in shape, I had to move around, run around, lift things up, do the fight scenes.”
Schwarzenegger further recalled leaning on his “support system” as videos showed him hitting the gym.
The “Expendables” star shares four children — sons Patrick, 29, and Christopher, 25, and daughters Katherine, 33, and Christina, 32 — with his ex-wife, Maria Shriver.
The actor wed Shriver, 67, in 1986. They split in 2011, but their divorce wasn’t finalized until a decade later.
Schwarzenegger also shares son Joseph Baena with Mildred “Patty” Baena, whom he had an affair with during his marriage to Shriver.
