Observant doctor picks up Warrnambool man's serious heart condition

Picking up scripts from the doctors is something Mr Sproston does quite regularly, but when he went to see his GP a few months ago the doctor said: "You're a bit short of breath".

"I said: 'Am I?'," Mr Sproston said. "I hadn't noticed. I was still mowing lawns. I was getting onto the platform ladder and trimming the top of the hedge. Just the normal sort of stuff - no pain, not noticing any shortness of breath."

His doctor ordered an ECG which was "all over the place" which meant a referral to a specialist.

Despite being able to mow his lawn and trim the hedge, Mr Sproston "failed miserably" the heart stress test.

"I almost fell off it. I just couldn't do anything. I had two nurses either side of it holding me up and helping me back to the bed while I got my breath back," he said.

That meant a trip straight to St Vincent's Private Hospital in Melbourne for an angiogram.

"I went up there expecting to have the test and then come home," Mr Sproston said. "They said: 'You're not going anywhere'."

A few days later he was undergoing a six-hour triple bypass surgery which ended up being a quadruple bypass.

"Three were almost completely blocked and one was completely blocked," he said.

Mr Sproston is still recovering from the surgery, and is limited in what he can do. But he hasn't forgotten the man who saved his life - Dr John Manderson at the Hopkins Medical Clinic.

"The first time I went back to him he had a student doctor in with him and I said 'this is the guy that saved my life'," he said.