Arnold Schwarzenegger Recounts Near-Fatal Heart Operation: ‘I Was…Freaking Out’
By Movieguide® Contributor
TERMINATOR star Arnold Schwarzenegger recently dished out some more details on his near-death experience in 2018.
Five years ago, Schwarzenegger underwent his third open-heart surgery, expecting it to be non-invasive.
It did not go according to plan.
“I was like really freaking out. I mean, I woke up all of a sudden and the doctors [were] sitting in front of me saying, ‘I’m so sorry but unlike what we planned, which was non-invasive surgery — to just go through the heart and replace the valve — we made a mistake and poked through the heart wall, and therefore we had to kind of get internal bleeding and open [you] up very quickly…to save your life,'” the actor shared.
The Guardian reported, “Schwarzenegger’s first words upon waking from the operation were ‘I’m back.’”
The actor needed to film TERMINATOR: DARK FATE only a few months later. He struggled to recuperate but asked his friends to encourage him, and they did. “They [would] say, ‘Okay, Arnold. Get up now. Let’s go walk the hallway,’” Schwarzenegger recounted.
“I knew I was not doing well, I looked like an idiot, you know wobbling around through the hallway,” he said. “But you know the bottom line was I was getting going because the doctor said, ‘You have to exercise your lungs because if you get pneumonia you can die.'”
“So I wanted to get really going with exercise, get out of the hospital as quick as possible, and then get going with the training again. Because…I had to be in shape. I had to be able to move around and run around, lift things up, do the fight scenes,” he shared.
HCA Healthcare reported shortly after the operation in 2018: “The 70-year-old had emergency open heart surgery. Now that the dust has settled and Schwarzenegger is on the mend, even tweeting – ‘It’s true: I’m back! I went to sleep expecting to wake up with a small incision and woke up with a big one – but guess what? I woke up, and that’s something to be thankful for.’”
Movieguide® previously reported on the actor’s Netflix series, ARNOLD:
ARNOLD is a 3-part series on Netflix telling Arnold Schwarzenegger’s life and career, in his own words and the words of many who worked closely with him. It encapsulates his life, starting as a child in a small Austrian town post-WWII and follows his journey into bodybuilding, America, acting and politics into the present day…
ARNOLD is well produced, with thoughtfully curated cinematography. A standard-in-class, autobiopic documentary, ARNOLD is an engagingly told story with moments of gritty shock value that momentarily take one “out” of the story and into the world and life experience it exhibits. This can be both a pro and a con to the viewer’s experience. While there are elements showing problematic and sinful realities, there is also much to admire and inspire within the story.
