Arnold Schwarzenegger opens up about his journey to recovery after 2018 heart surgery

Arnold Schwarzenegger has recently opened up about his challenging recovery after his near-fatal heart operation in 2018.

“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,’” said the Hollywood star.

Arnold recalled, “I said, ‘Well great. This is really great news.’”

“I mean, Jesus. Anyway, the bottom line is that you cannot roll the clock back. It's a disaster. I was in the middle of a disaster,” stated the actor in a video posted to YouTube for Arnold's Pump Club.

In the clip, Arnold revealed that at the time of heart surgery, he was going for filming the sixth instalment of The Terminator.

“So now it's, ‘How do I get out of it? So, you have to shift gears. You collect yourself, shift gears and say okay, ‘What I need to do now is, I got to get out of this hospital, number one,’” pointed out the 76-year-old actor.

Dishing out details, Arnold mentioned, “I called my buddies in and I said, ‘You guys have to fire me up. You have to count the number of steps that I'm doing.' And so, this is what they did every day, everyone came in there to the hospital. They say, ‘Okay, Arnold. Get up now. Let's go walk the hallway.’”

“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…three months later, I started with ‘Terminator 6.’ So, I had to be in shape,” he shared.

Arnold added, “I had a whole support system and it was fantastic, the way all the guys pumped me up and got me going.”