Comedian Bert Kreischer says blood clot scare may have saved him from dying in a tour bus fire
Comedian Bert Kreischer revealed how suffering a terrifying medical ordeal may have saved his life.
In early January, the 53-year-old "Free Bert" star went to the emergency room after severe leg pain woke him up in the middle of the night. At the hospital, doctors found a significant blood clot behind Kreischer's knee and then discovered additional clots in his lungs. Afterward, he was placed on blood thinners and had to stop drinking alcohol while recovering.
In March 2026, Kreischer and his team were traveling on one of his tour buses in between stops in North Dakota and Iowa when the vehicle suffered a major tire blowout on Interstate 94 around midnight. The group then left the bus and continued on other crew buses.
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The following morning, the first bus caught on fire and was destroyed. The driver, who was the only occupant of the bus at the time, escaped safely before the vehicle was engulfed in flames.
During an interview with Fox News Digital, Kreischer recalled a later conversation with the driver in which he realized that had he been on the bus, he would have perished in the disaster if it weren't for the forced lifestyle change that he made due to his major health scare.
"Two weeks after it burned down, I go to get on my new tour bus with my same tour bus driver who was in the fire. And he says to me casually — and it hadn't affected me at all — he goes, 'Man, you're lucky you got that blood clot," Kreischer said at a For Your Consideration (FYC) event for "Free Bert."
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Kreischer continued, "And I was like, 'Huh?' And he goes, 'Old-school Bertie boy would have been drinking. You didn't pass out in the back. We would have just let you sleep. Bus would have caught on fire, man. You would have dead. That thing caught up in 30 seconds.'"
"That's when it affected me the most," he remembered.
While reflecting on how the bus fire had changed his perspective on life, Kreischer said that it changed his outlook, but not in the dramatic way people might expect because he wasn't actually on the bus when it burned.
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However, Kreischer explained that it left him with a greater appreciation for random twists of fate.
"I've realized how valuable life is," he said "I realized how luck works in certain ways and you gotta see everything is lucky because all those things are real."
Kreischer drew a parallel to Seth MacFarlane's well-known story of missing a flight on the first plane hijacked during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and how the "Family Guy" creator reacted in the aftermath.
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"He dodged the planes on 9/11," Kreischer said. "He overslept. And I remember being like, 'How is he not more intensely affected by this moment?' And his answer was 'I missed a lot of flights.' Like, that was his answer And you're like, 'Dude, 9/11, that should have been you' and he's like, 'But I missed my flights a lot.'"
"It's crazy," he added. "I just felt like you got to look at every instance as luck."
While speaking with Fox News Digital, Kreischer admitted that his blood clot diagnosis marked a turning point in his health and weight loss journey. The "2 Bears, 1 Cave" podcast host has previously spoken out about losing a significant amount of weight over the last few months after making major lifestyle changes.
The comedian, who often appears shirtless in "Free Bert," recalled that brutal feedback from his daughter Ila, 19, about his physique during the show's first season made him realize that he had gained an unhealthy amount of weight.
"'Buddy, I think you lost your belly button,'" Kreischer remembered Ila telling him. "I had gotten so fat that my belly button just disappeared."
"I can't tell you how dramatic of an experience it was," he said. "And I had panic about it for a while. It went just flat."
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Kreischer explained that he committed to a weight loss plan at the urging of his doctor and his wife LeeAnn, with whom he shares Ila and daughter Georgia, 21.
"Let's just be fair, it was doctor-imposed. It was doctor and wife and family-imposed," he said. "They all agree that I am overweight. They send me to the doctor."
Kreischer said that after he underwent a full-body scan, his doctor determined that his body fat percentage was 40%.
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"Which doesn't sound that bad out of 100%, OK?" Kreischer said.
Kreischer explained that he began taking tirzepatide, a GLP-1 medication, to lose visceral fat with the goal of shedding 95 pounds.
"Then I get the blood clot," he recalled. "And then the blood clot was the first time that I had any feeling of mortality. I felt like a snowman in March. Like all of a sudden I realized, 'Oh, I'm not indestructible.'"
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"I remember getting pushed to the hospital and looking at people that I thought were in bad shape," Kreischer continued. "And then in a matter of minutes, I was the one in bad shape. It was terrifying, it was overwhelming. And then the bus burns down. Our dog dies of a stroke on the couch. I mean, all this stuff made me realize justhow precious and lucky you are to just be here, you know?"
Kreischer is famous for his hard-partying, beer-drinking "Machine" persona, which is based on a bit that he incorporated into his stand up comedy act and later became his calling card. It was adapted into the 2023 comedy film "The Machine," in which Kreischer played a fictionalized version of himself.
However, Kreischer said that his new sober lifestyle had forced him to cope with his feelings instead of masking them.
"I haven't drank because I'm on blood thinners," he noted. "So then I've got all this sobriety of trying to figure out what these feelings are. I think, you get to a certain age where you're just like, 'Man, all of this is just luck.'"
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Kreischer spoke to Fox News Digital ahead of attending a For Your Consideration(FYC) event for "Free Bert" in which he participated in a screening and Q&A aimed at Emmy Award voters.
In the Netflix comedy series, Kreischer plays a fictionalized version of himself, a famous shirtless comedian trying to navigate family life and elite Beverly Hills social circles. Netflix announced in March that it had renewed the show for a second season.
During his interview with Fox News Digital, Kreischer marveled over how his life had changed since his humble beginnings as a broke father in Los Angeles.
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"I mean I said to my wife, 'We're getting dressed to go to an FYC event. What?' An FYC event for a TV show that people seem to like, that's been renewed for season two,'" he said. "Our kids are doing good. We are living the dream."
"If you had told us 22 years ago when we were giving birth over at Cedar Sinai [Medical Center]and broke, not sure we could afford it, that we'd be here, we made it," he continued. "We made it, and if you're telling me the cut is I can't drink on planes, I'll do it."
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Kreischer also shed some light on what fans can expect from the next chapter of "Free Bert."
"Hopefully as much fun," he said. "It's so hard. It's not like you're making kids. You don't have any idea what they're gonna come out like. You hope it comes out as fun as the first one, but the first time we had no expectations, no realizations. We were just gonna make something that made us laugh."
Kreicher continued, "And with this one, you're like, well you've got testing, you know what people like, people seem to appeal to this and that, and you know that you got characters that really stand out. I wanna give them a little more of that. But also, one of the things, you don't wanna give them too much of that, you know?"
"It's like cocaine," he joked.