Arnold Schwarzenegger said he recently underwent surgery to have a pacemaker implanted, then made a joke about it.
“Last Monday, I had surgery to become a little bit more of a machine: I got a pacemaker,” he said on a new episode of his “Arnold’s Pump Club” podcast.
“First of all, I want you to know I’m doing great! I had my surgery on Monday, and by Friday, I was already at a big environmental event with my friend and fellow fitness crusader Jane Fonda,” Schwarzenegger continued. “Nobody would ever have thought I started the week with a surgery.”
“I want to thank my whole team at the Cleveland Clinic. All of the doctors and nurses took amazing care of me and made the surgery as painless as possible,” he added.
The A-list actor and former Republican governor of California had undergone three previous open heart surgeries. In 1997, Schwarzenegger had his pulmonic valve and aortic valve replaced, per People. He had both of those new parts replaced with subsequent surgeries in 2018 and 2020. The scar tissue has caused him to have an irregular heartbeat, he said.
“I stayed in touch with my medical team and visited in person at least once a year to get a full check-up and see how my heart was doing,” the actor said. “That’s life with a genetic heart issue. But you won’t hear me complaining.”
Schwarzenegger said he’s especially concerned about keeping close communication with his medical team because his mother died in 1998 after not getting valve replacement surgery.
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“I went in for my normal checkup at the beginning of March on my way to the Arnold Sports Festival, and they did a full series of tests,” the “Terminator” star revealed. “I told them I’d stop in Cleveland on my way home from the UK, and we’d do it. Monday, I went under and got my new machine part installed,” he said. “Like I said, by Friday, I was out doing my normal environmental work, and nobody knew anything.”
The actor also discussed how, in Austrian culture, people don’t always talk about personal details such as medical challenges. He hopes his candid conversations will inspire podcast listeners to take action themselves.
“I could have kept it a secret. But I know that we have more than 750,000 subscribers now — the village is a city now — and a lot of you are probably dealing with your own health challenges,” he said. “I want you to know you aren’t alone. And if you’re putting something off out of fear, I hope I inspire you to listen to your doctors and take care of yourself.”