It is early October 2019. The founder of globally successful male revue Thunder from Down Under and partner in Nineteen at the Star’s rooftop bar has been feeling off colour for days.

He has projectile vomited at ungodly hours two nights in a row. His jaw feels like someone punched him. And the pain is getting worse.

He puts it down to indigestion, as does a Gold Coast GP. The furthest from his mind is a heart attack — which he is minutes away from having, right there in the hospital.

He gets medical checks religiously — “I’m so anal” – skin checks, prostate checks, colonoscopies. But doesn’t worry about his heart, calcium score or cholesterol level.

Why would he? He is a picture of health, trains regularly, watches his diet.

For the successful 55-year-old father of two and half of Gold Coast golden couple with wife Jackie, life is good.

But then all of a sudden it is not. Two heart tests — or electrocardiograms (ECGs) — show enough to leave close friend and Pindara emergency department director Dr George Bilios “uncomfortable”.

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A blood test is awaited. It will tell Dr Bilios there is heart damage. Then the nurse reads a third ECG — which makes it clear what is about to happen — and in Billy’s words the atmosphere “goes from zero to 100 within seconds”.

Jackie: “There was just this moment when the nurse pulled the third ECG paper off and had a distinct run in her step and she was saying “George! George! George!” and in 45 seconds curtains were being swung around, the defibrillator was being put on the bed, they were shaving him down, and people came in from everywhere. It started to escalate.

“I was like ‘What is going on?’. We are going down the halls of Pindara and they are kind of trotting with Billy.”

Billy: “All I remember is laying there, Jackie on my side, the nurse by my side and she gets the results and ran out. The bit that freaks me out — I’m getting weird just thinking about it — they put the defibrillator patches on my chest. A&E to heart surgery is 10 to 15 metres and I was getting rushed in.

“They said to Jackie, ‘you have to wait out there’. And Jackie doesn’t have a poker face. All I remember is looking at her and I thought ‘I’m f***ed. I’m not going to come out of this’.”

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Pindara heart surgeon Dr Shailesh Khatri — whose business card notes he’s “available 24-7 for chest pain” — determines in Pindara’s catheter lab that of Billy’s three main heart arteries, two are fully blocked and one is 50 per cent.

Via a delicate procedure through the groin leaving only a small hole, he puts three stents in Billy’s arteries, clears blockages and opens up blood flow to the life-giving organ.

It is hours before Dr Khatri can update Jackie, who is confused by the appearance of a cardiologist.

Jackie: “It was very surreal. Dr Khatri is a very gentle, calming guy. But I remember I said ‘Did he have a heart attack? A real heart attack?” He said: ‘He had a massive heart attack’.”

BARBER, BOXING AND DR BILIOS

FAST forward 12 months and Billy has bounced back. His heart has 100 per cent recovered. He is one of the lucky ones — a walking, talking cautionary tale who almost left it too late.

He is sharing his story to raise awareness so other men in similar circumstances don’t leave it as long as he did. Aside from this interview a year on, the only time he has spoken about it publicly is at Friday’s Men’s Health Awareness Day for Blokes — organised with men’s health charity Livin and by Wickedbodz Fitness Centre — at Nineteen.

Sitting in a Main Beach cafe last week — where he orders a juice — Billy reflects incredulously on 60 hours leading up to his Friday afternoon heart attack that he spent ignoring signs.

Not to mention for months prior he lost his recovery rate during fitness training sessions — and instead of realising it was because he was running on half an artery, thought he was unfit and needed to train harder.

On the Wednesday night he went to bed unwell — “not feeling myself” — and at 9.30pm was vomiting violently. He felt fine on Thursday morning. Then that night he woke at 2am and projectile vomited — “aggressively, violently” – again: “I started getting pain in my chest. But the one that was the perfect giveaway was the jaw — I felt like someone was punching me in the jaw or strangling me. They say pain in the shoulder, chest can be a million things but the jaw is 99 per cent a heart attack. In hindsight if I knew my symptoms, I should have gone to the hospital there and then.”

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Despite all this, on the Friday morning, the only reason he misses high-intensity boxing training with WickedBodz Fitness Centre owner Mark Mathie is because the latter is recovering from eye surgery. For the first time in 17 years, Mr Mathie — in a moment Billy puts down to fate — cancels a client.

By midday Billy heads off for his weekly haircut to the Mobile Barber Shop Depot where owner Joey D’Adderio senses something is seriously wrong.

Mr D’Adderio: “I’ve known Billy for 100 years and he didn’t look like Billy. He was super pale. He said ‘I don’t feel so good’ and he put his hands on his chest. I said ‘Excuse my French but you look f***ed — do you want me to call an ambulance?’.”

Billy didn’t and calls close friend Dr George Bilios at Pindara Private Hospital who advises him to immediately call an ambulance and get to him at Pindara A&E.

Billy: “I said ‘Do you mind if I have my haircut first?’. He said ‘Listen, just get here now’. I don’t know if it’s my stubbornness or arrogance but I left the barber, got in the car and went home. And what was stupid is from where the barber is to where Pindara is is like driving around the corner. I drove away. I got home, Jackie freaked and said ‘C’mon get in the car’.”

All the while the feeling of being hit in the jaw and being strangled is getting worse.

Jackie: “I drove through a red light. There was a bit of a sense of urgency. I was starting to get more concerned.”

Billy admits he was “still a bit ‘She’ll be right mate’ and that is part of the regret today.”

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Dr Bilios — who recently holidayed with the Crosses overseas — recalls being a tad frustrated when Billy called describing symptoms and then “wanted to get his hair done first”.

“That pissed me off. I’m trying to get him to understand the magnitude of the problem I have filtering through symptoms like that over the phone. Impossible.

“And I want to be his friend and say most of the time it will be indigestion. Most of the time it is. But most heart attacks get called indigestion, a bad prawn, I’ve got asthma, I’m coming down with something, I’ve had a big night. That’s OK if you are 20 but if you are a 50-year-old and still in denial and haven’t been hit with any health issues yet you are going to call it other things — because you don’t believe it’s possible, it’s the last thing on your mind.”

Dr Bilios said the blood test confirmed Billy had a “heart injury” whilst the more instant ECGs “evolved while he was here”.

“The beauty of this case is Billy got found almost too late — but people can be found a lot earlier.”

Asked what might have happened if he’d gone to boxing training instead with 50 per cent of one artery supporting his heart, Dr Bilios said: “He was having a heart attack. That could have killed him. Anything that increases demand on the heart when vulnerable, that electrical thing could have kicked in easily that day.”

That “electrical thing” being an event triggered by a heart attack which can lead to cardiac arrest — which Dr Bilios calls a “quick out”.

What the Crosses only realised later when Jackie started calling family was Billy’s elder brother had a heart attack at 48. Billy’s grandfather and his dad’s brother both died of heart attacks.

ESCAPING THE BLACK HOLE

BILLY admits going into a deep depression for a month afterwards.

“I’d dodged a bullet and should have been cheering for joy. But I wasn’t.”

The first Monday after surgery when sitting down to dinner with Jackie and sons Josh, 21, and Nick, 17, Billy says he “completely broke down”.

“I could not control the crying because I sat there thinking they could be having dinner, mourning me because it was so touch and go. What happened to me was I was having a heart attack (at the hospital). But what happens if I was at the barber? What if I was at home?

“It took me a good month to get my head right. I felt like I’d let my family down.”

Jackie: “No one really talks about the post trauma of it. I didn’t want to take my eyes off him when he was asleep at night. You are constantly waking up. What if he was on a plane to Vegas that day or what if he had gone to boxing. Then you come back home to your kids and that moment was pretty distressing, You are faced with beautiful children, Josh’s girlfriend … and you just have a moment.”

Billy organised a breakfast with a fellow heart attack survivor and says it was crucial to emerging from “the black hole”: “They have been there, recovered, are going forward and being healthy. You don’t realise how common it is.

“Hearing their stories helps you manage your recovery. Physically I knew I was going to be right — I started walking, training, eating right. But mentally I was struggling. It really messed me up.”

He and Jackie now walk 5km daily as “homage” to his recovery — after Dr Khatri advised it early on after the surgery.
He has since become a huge advocate for getting “stress” tested by doctors and has texts from friends saying they owe him their life after being told they were “ticking time bombs” with dangerously high cholesterol.

“If your body is not doing what it normally is doing, you have to listen. If one guy walks away from me telling my story and gets a test that shows something is not right, I’ll feel I have done my job.

“If I tell my story and you go get a calcium score or someone gets an ECG or a cholesterol check that is what is going to help people.”