On the Canberra long weekend in March, just as coronavirus restrictions were poised to lock down the nation, John "Banjo" Sayers was on holiday driving to Noosa Heads when he received a completely unexpected, life-changing phone call.
"Are you driving? Please pull over right now," his doctor instructed sternly.
The news was very bad.
His coronary calcium scoring, a test which measures the amount of calcified plaque in your coronary arteries, had just returned and it was "off the scale".
A moderate score, indicating the likelihood of a heart attack in coming years, is between 100 and 400.
Johnny Banjo's score was 3500.
"I was just speechless," he said.
"I mean, I felt great. I'm 56 years old but I really look after myself; I'm a surfer, we eat organic food at home, I swim laps, I ride a mountain bike.
"How can this score be mine?"
What was supposed to be a family holiday for the builder from Hall turned into an immediate preparation for surgery.
"It was only by chance that I'd gone for all the medical tests a little before then, the gold standard tests, and I sailed through them. Except for this one, and it was a really bad one to fail," he said.
The bricklayer from Ulladulla, who had moved to Canberra and built dozens of homes in the ACT, said the result completely floored him.
"This was only ever meant to be a short break in Queensland," he said.
"But once I was up for major surgery, we were locked down here for a long time."
As the team at the Gold Coast hospital prepared to crack open his chest - "they call it the cabbage, because that's what it looks like when they open up your ribcage" - hospital restrictions slammed into place, maximum protective equipment was called in and patient anxiety levels were ramping up as the COVID-19 pandemic bit hard.
"It was a pretty fraught time. At one stage, they were going to call my surgery off because my daughter had just come back from overseas and had visited me before I was due to go in," he said.
"She had been tested for coronavirus so there was a nervous wait [before] the results came back negative."
All the time leading up to his surgery and afterward, when he could move again, he had his ukelele at his bedside and would "serenade" the staff.
"I'm not much of a singer but the staff enjoyed it; I think it gave them a few laughs when they really needed it," he said.
Eight weeks on, as he and his wife are still unable to return home to Canberra - "we're basically squatters up here at the moment", he says. He is grateful to a friend for lending them use of a vacant holiday home.
He was tracking well until recently, when "something tore" inside his chest again and he couldn't inflate one lung. Now he's almost sedentary as the internal healing process resets.
"It's frustrating because I'm healed on the outside, but not on the inside," he said.
"What they also don't tell you about heart surgery is that it totally wrecks your immune system, so you have to be super careful, particularly in the middle of a pandemic.
"You can't even catch a cab or an Uber, it's just too risky."
He now owns his own defibrillator and believes his medical experience, occurring in the middle of the national lockdown, offers a cautionary tale to other men his age and older.
"Most blokes do think they're invincible," he said.
"But you can get completely blindsided by a health issue when you least expect it, just like I did. Right out of the blue.
"So here's the message to all those blokes out there: go and get yourself checked out and your heart tested. You might think you are fine, but you just never know.
"I certainly didn't."
