How Arnold Schwarzenegger got stuck on the walker and fought his way back to life

The terminator once very vulnerable in a surgical shirt: Arnold Schwarzenegger allowed surprisingly intimate insights in a new YouTube video. In the clip, the Hollywood star reports on the recovery from heart surgery that went wrong in 2018.

Five years ago, Schwarzenegger had the surgery — his third, as he explains in the video. The procedure was planned as a minimally invasive surgery, but something went wrong. Doctors accidentally pierced his heart wall. Schwarzenegger had to be woken up, his doctor told him he needed open heart surgery soon.

After the life-saving operation, Schwarzenegger had to get used to the new situation. “You can’t turn back time,” the actor says in the video. He had to adapt to the ‘catastrophe’ into which he had fallen. Finally, the shooting of “Terminator: Dark Fate” was imminent, the sixth part of the action saga.

“I have to leave this hospital,” Schwarzenegger thought at the time. Step one: He had to start walking again as soon as possible. The doctors had advised him to train his lungs. The “Fubar” actor started with ten steps, later he ran to the nurse’s station. Then he called friends who encouraged him to walk down the aisle. “I looked like an idiot waddling down the aisle,” he recalls.

He shows pictures of it in the video. Dressed in a scrub shirt, he leans on an oxygen tank wagon that serves as a walker. Behind him walks a nurse in a wheelchair. The attempt was successful. Three months before the start of the shooting of “Terminator 6”, Schwarzenegger came out of the hospital. He immediately started training for the action sequences, which can also be seen in the video.

Arnold Schwarzenegger blamed his positive attitude for the quick recovery – but also the people who supported him: “We can’t do this all alone.”

(t-online/dsc)