Arnold Schwarzenegger made his first statement following his open heart surgery this weekend, making a “Terminator” joke by announcing, “I’m back.”
“I went to sleep expecting to wake up with a small incision and woke up with a big one,” the 70-year-old actor, bodybuilder and former California governor tweeted. “But guess what? I woke up, and that’s something to be thankful for. Thank you to the doctors & nurses. And I’m truly filled with gratitude for all of the kind messages.”
On Thursday, Schwarzenegger’s spokesman, Daniel Ketchell, said that the Governator underwent a planned procedure at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles to replace a pulmonic valve that was originally replaced due to a congenital heart defect in 1997. During that procedure, Ketchall wrote, an open-heart surgery team was prepared, “as they frequently are in these circumstances,” thus Schwarzenegger’s larger incision.
“That 1997 replacement valve was never meant to be permanent, and has outlived its life expectancy, so he chose to replace it yesterday through a less-evasive catheter valve replacement,” Ketchell said in a statement.
It’s true: I’m back! 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. Thank you to the doctors & nurses. And I’m truly filled with gratitude for all of the kind messages.
— Arnold (@Schwarzenegger) April 2, 2018
My statement on Governor @Schwarzenegger‘s procedure. pic.twitter.com/7RoVtHN43c
— Daniel Ketchell (@ketch) March 30, 2018
Schwarzenegger is currently slated to appear in the upcoming reboot of the “Terminator” series, which will be released in 2019. In the meantime, he has focused his efforts on political activism, fighting against gerrymandering and environmental injustice. Before his surgery, he told a panel at SXSW that he wants to sue oil companies for “knowingly killing people all over the world.”