One year after surviving a near-death experience on the set of Better Call Saul, Bob Odenkirk is feeling thankful.
On July 27, the actor, 59, penned a poignant message to his fans on Twitter thanking them for their support after he suffered a heart attack while filming the final season of the Emmy award-nominated AMC series last year.
"A Thank You to you, whoever you are," he wrote. "A year ago today I briefly flirted with "quietus" and this elicited a wave of goodwill and warmth towards me. I will forever feel unworthy of it. I will also always be appreciative and look to pass it on. Thank you. No reply necessary."
Bob detailed his terrifying experience in a New York Times interview published in February. "We'd been shooting all day, and luckily I didn't go back to my trailer," he told the outlet. "I went to play the Cubs game and ride my workout bike, and I just went down."
The Breaking Bad alum said that he "started turning bluish-gray right away" before he was resuscitated by the show's health safety supervisor Rosa Estrada and assistant director Angie Meyer, who shocked him three times with a defibrillator.
"I had a small heart attack," Bob later confirmed in a July 30 tweet. "But I'm going to be ok thanks to Rosa Estrada and the doctors who knew how to fix the blockage without surgery."
He continued, "Thank you. To my family and friends who have surrounded me this week. And for the outpouring of love from everyone who expressed concern and care for me. It's overwhelming. But I feel the love and it means so much.'
After he was discharged from the hospital, Bob said that the show put regulations in place to make sure that he could safely return to set.
"I had a five-week break to recover. And then when I went back, we limited our shooting to 12-hour days," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "They took care of me and I was able to do it, and hopefully you can't tell when I had the heart attack and when I didn't."
However, the actor noted that he remembers very little about the time before and after his health scare.
"I'm really watching something that I don't have any memory of acting in, which is a rare thing. I mean, usually you watch some, and you have some recall of that even if it was shot months ago. But in this case, it's such a complete blank," he told the outlet. "It's very strange. I gotta tell you, it's a weird thing to have lost basically about a week and a half. Clean, just clean, clean nothing."
He also urged the importance of learning how to perform CPR to save others like him.
"I didn't get a heart rate for 18 minutes after this started, and that's a long time," he told NPR. "Please take a CPR class because the fact that it was done almost immediately —within a minute and minute and a half—and it was done so well, it was done properly—that's what really saved me."