australia's richest
caricature competition

The MICHAEL COLLINS CARICATURE AWARD 2010
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Thanks to everyone who has entered the competition. Your support has seen the competition grow bigger and bigger each year.

Unfortunately we’re a little low on manpower for the committee, so the decision has been made to take a year off to re-group the committee and find some new helpers. This means the competition will be on hold this year.

For more information please visit our News Page.

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Funds from the sale of entries will be donated to the Heart Foundation, to invest in life-saving research and health promotion studies.

Case Study - Simon Blears... Leaving work on the afternoon before the Australia Day long weekend in 2008, Simon Blears started to feel unwell, with a tight chest and what he thought might be indigestion. Three weeks later he had a triple by-pass operation on his heart after being told by a specialist there was an 80 per cent chance he would die sometime in the next year if he didn't have surgery. Simon, who works in Information Technology in the Mining Industry, was aged 46 and the fact he had symptoms of acute heart disease wasn't the first thing that occurred to him. "During the half hour drive home I had cold sweats and started to feel clammy, and by the last 10 minutes I really shouldn't have been driving because I was rushing through lights to get home quickly," Simon says. "I thought maybe something I'd eaten had disagreed with me, and when I got home I rushed into a cold shower as I felt so terrible." Then Simon started to feel anxious and nauseous, and about an hour after he had left work he felt pain at the top of his arms. "At that point something twigged, and I wondered if it was a heart attack," Simon says. He turned his computer on and did a search. "When I got to the Heart Foundation's site I was going down the list of symptoms going tick, tick, tick, and I realised that's what it probably was," he says. After some hesitation in case he was wrong and would be embarrassed, he rang triple zero and was taken to Royal Perth Hospital by ambulance. "There was a lot of traffic around and the ambulance was driving normally until the guy doing the monitoring says to the driver "Not quick enough, light it up". I was taken to emergency and looked at within minutes," Simon says. A subsequent blood test revealed Simon had had a medium level heart attack. He had an angiogram procedure to insert a couple of stents into the problem arteries but it was found to be more serious and it was decided that he needed a bypass operation. Because there were no further symptoms, he was sent home after a few days in hospital to prepare for the operation. A non-smoker, with no family history of heart disease that he knew of, Simon puts his problem down to not enough exercise and a poor diet. He was told his cholesterol level was double what it should have been, and brought it down to three within four months. "I'm exercising a lot more and eating good food regularly," Simon says. "I haven't had a bag of hot chips for lunch since it happened." He says the experience was confronting and it helped having a permanent scar on his chest to remind him of the consequences of not looking after his health. "A year before that I'd been told I was a candidate for a heart attack, but I only behaved myself for about a month," Simon says. "This time it was different, and I'd say to anyone 'Go for your cholesterol checks and listen to your GP'." ..................................................................................

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