Minnesota woman wins $100K in Vikings-themed lottery right after being diagnosed with Stage 4 brain cancer
EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. — Debbie Bury's passion is blackjack. It's a game that got concerning a few weeks back when the numbers stopped adding up.
"They weren't coming together right," Bury said. "A lot of times you have to put cards in order, they just — they didn't want to play with me. They are like, 'We are done with you, you don't have it anymore.'"
Something was wrong. She quickly ended up on the fifth floor of Methodist Hospital, where a doctor broke the news she had Stage 4 brain cancer.
"She said, 'I just gotta let you know you have three cancers in your head.'" Bury said.
But she could still feel the love.
"I would say the first day, I had about 26 friends come to see me," Bury said.
The fifth-floor staff became her friends too.
"She was just a joy to the floor," Andrea O'Hern, Oncology Nurse Manager at Methodist Hospital, said. "I made a crown for her, Queen of Methodist Hospital. She was just loving it cause she just lit up a room."
It's a floor that could use some joy. That's what it got when a visitor brought Bury a Vikings-themed gift: a scratch-off Vikings lottery ticket.
Bury says the purple pride reminds her of her beloved father.
"Oh gosh you got a football, oh my gosh, I think you won $100," Bury said. "He goes, 'Push it back – you just won $100,000.'"
Melissa Cryer, Bury's daughter, says that her mom thought it was fake at first.
"I go, 'No it's not, Mom. I play these scratch-offs.'" Cryer said. "Crying, I just bawled. it was just amazing."
Just like that, the dealer became the winner.
O'Hern says word traveled fast at the hospital.
"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."
In the worst of times, Bury had the best of luck.
"It's just, it was meant to be," she said.
The other good news is that she had a successful surgery. The cancer is aggressive, but Bury is a fighter.
"I'm gonna live to be 80," she said.
