Arnold Schwarzenegger Recalls Waking Up During Unplanned Open Heart Surgery: 'It Was a Disaster'

Despite Arnold Schwarzenegger's muscle man persona, the actor hasn't always been in the best state of health — something he opened up about on his YouTube channel.

In a video posted last month, the movie star, 76, discussed his health journey and recalled one scary incident in which he was undergoing his third open heart surgery in 2018.

"I was really freaking out, and I woke up all of a sudden and the doctor was standing in front of me, and saying 'I'm so sorry, but unlike what we planned, a non-invasive surgery ... we made a mistake and poked through the heart wall, and there was internal bleeding, and we had to open [you] up to save your life,'" the dad-of-five shared.

Schwarzenegger went on to talk about how the moment changed his outlook going forward, as he was determined to recover and stay healthy.

"The bottom line is, you cannot roll the clock back," he said. "It was a disaster. 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."

Once he was cleared, he began walking around the hospital, and he even phoned his friends to give him some extra motivation.

"I called my buddies in and said, 'You guys have to fire me up. You have to count the number of steps that I'm doing.' And this is what we did, everyday," the former governor spilled. "Everybody came into the hospital, they said, 'OK, Arnold, it's time to get up!' 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."

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Just three months later, Schwarzenegger began production on the sixth Terminator flick.

"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 I did it! Because I had a positive attitude and knew exactly how I was going to get there," he shared. "[And] I had the support system, because none of this we can do by ourselves... When I started shooting Terminator 6, I was all back together again."