Arnold Schwarzenegger reveals how he survived after doctor botched noninvasive heart procedure

Arnold Schwarzenegger has revealed new details and a video about a 2018 operation in which the surgeon accidentally cut into the star’s heart, requiring emergency procedures to save his life.

“I want you to know that even though you see me as Mr. Universe and The Terminator, I’ve also had to start from scratch,” said the actor, former bodybuilding champion and California governor, 75, on Monday's episode of his health-and-fitness podcast, “Arnold's Pump Club,” in a talk about motivation.

“When I had my heart surgery five years ago, a noninvasive procedure went south and became full-blown open-heart surgery” — something mentioned obliquely in a 2018 tweet where he wrote, “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.”

“No one had ever seen video of me during this time,” Schwarzenegger said in Monday’s podcast. “But I shared it with my little app village two weeks ago to help inspire a few of our users who were worried about coming back from their own surgeries. And now I'm sharing it with you,” he said, making widely public the previously unlisted, Aug. 23 YouTube video done for users of his workout app, The Pump.

“I was, like, really freaking out,” he says in the 2¼-minute video about the aftermath of a normally minimally invasive procedure to replace the more than 20-year-old pulmonic valve installed in 1997 for his congenital heart defect, aortic stenosis. “I woke up and all of a sudden the doctor was sitting 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 therefore we had to ... [address the] internal bleeding,' and they had to open me up very quickly to save ... [my] life.”

With a rueful chuckle, Schwarzenegger adds that, “I said, ‘Well, great. This is really great news.’ … So anyway, the bottom line is that you cannot roll the clock back. It’s a disaster. … So now it’s, how do I get out of it? So you have to shift gears.”

That meant telling himself, “I’ve got to get out of this hospital, Number One … by getting out of bed and start walking. … First 10 steps, then … around the nurses’ station” and gradually more. “And then I called my buddies in … to fire me up,” he says, as the video shows four young men walking with him across an air bridge at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

“Everyone came in there to the hospital and they said, ‘OK, Arnold, get up now! Let’s go walk the hallway!’ … I looked like an idiot, y'know, wobbling around through the hallway. But … the doctors 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 quickly as possible and then get going with the training again” to begin shooting “Terminator: Dark Fate” (2019), the sixth Terminator movie, three months later.

He was able to do so, he said, “because I had a positive attitude … I had the support system, because none of this we can do by ourselves.”