Arnold Schwarzenegger Shares Near-Death Experience After Medical 'Mistake'
Arnold Schwarzenegger is hoping to inspire anyone who may be struggling to recover following medical trauma with his own tale of healing.
The Terminator star opened up about heart surgery gone wrong on his podcast, Arnold's Pump Club, revealing that when he had his third open heart surgery, just before they were set to start work on the sixth installment of the Terminator franchise, his doctor made a mistake that almost cost him his life.
What was meant to be a noninvasive procedure, in which doctors would go in from his groin and up to the heart to replace a valve, became a major operation when something went wrong, leading the fitness buff to "really freak out."
"I mean, I woke up all of a sudden and the doctors were standing in front of me and saying, 'I'm so sorry, but unlike what we planned...we made a mistake and poked through the heart wall and...you had internal bleeding and we had to open [you] up very quickly to save your life,'" the actor recounted in a video clip uploaded to the podcast's YouTube channel.
But as much as things didn't go to plan, the actor knew there was no way to go but forward: "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."
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His first goal was to get out of the hospital, which meant getting out of bed and back on his feet.
He included footage of himself in the hospital, walking down a hallway in slipper socks and pushing an Oxygen cart for support. "First 10 steps, then over around the nurse's station, then longer and longer," he recalled, calling his friends in sometimes to help "fire [him] up."
Pneumonia was a big concern for his medical team, so he made sure to get his steps in every day to exercise his lungs. "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," he explained. "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."
And it worked—just three months later, he started filming. He credits his positive attitude, knowing "exactly how" he was going to meet his goals, and his support system. "None of this we can do by ourselves," he emphasized the help of his friends again for pumping him up.
"When I started shooting Terminator 6, I was all back together again," he concluded.
Thankfully, he was perfectly healthy when it came time to go to war with the city of Los Angeles over unfilled potholes, taking matters into his own hands.
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