A Minnesota woman is celebrating after she won the lottery while in hospital battling stage four brain cancer.
Debbie Bury was on the fifth floor of the Methodist Hospital in Eden Prairie, about 20 minutes outside Minneapolis when a visitor handed her a scratch-off Vikings lottery ticket. A lifelong fan of the NFL team, Bury had been admitted a few weeks earlier following her cancer diagnosis.
As she scratched the ticket, she first thought she’d won a football, then $100 and later realized it was the $100,000 proze.
Melissa Cryer, Bury’s daughter, cried when her mother won the lottery. Bury initially thought the jackpot was fake. “I just balled. I just could not believe it. It was just amazing,” the daughter told TV station WCCO.
Andrea O’Hearn, an oncology nurse manager, said the noise in her patient’s room caused her to worry that something bad had happened.
“There was an unbelievable eruption and people were like, ‘What’s happening, what’s going on?’ Usually when you have that something bad happened, but she couldn’t even speak,” O’Hern said.
“It’s not all the time you get joyful surprises on the oncology floor. Just to see this is so different than what we see on the daily and we get to celebrate with you.”
After her diagnosis, Bury said that the win signified a wave of good luck.
“It just felt like life is now going to be good,” Bury said. “It’s just, it was meant to be.”
She also recently underwent a successful surgery for the tumor, which doctors hope will extend her life expectancy by six years. But she told the outlet she hopes she gets to live until she’s 80.
