EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. – Debbie Bury’s passion is Blackjack. It’s a game that caused concern a few weeks ago when the numbers stopped adding up.
“They didn’t come together well,” Bury said. “A lot of times you have to put the cards in order, but they just didn’t want to play with me. They said, ‘We’re 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 that she had stage four brain cancer.
“She said, ‘I have to let you know that you have three cancers in your head.’” Bury said.
But she could still feel the love.
“I would say on the first day I had about 26 friends come up to me,” Bury said.
The staff on the fifth floor also became her friends.
“She was just a joy to the floor,” said Andrea O’Hern, oncology nurse manager at Methodist Hospital. “I made her a crown, Queen of the Methodist Hospital. She loved it because she just lit up a room.”
It is a floor that could use some cheerfulness. That’s what happened when a visitor brought Bury a Viking-themed gift: a scratch ticket from the Vikings lottery.
“Oh god, you got a football, oh my god, I think you won $100,” Bury said. “He says, ‘Push it back, you just won $100,000.'”
Melissa Cryer, Bury’s daughter, says her mother initially thought it was fake.
“I say, ‘No, it’s not that, Mom. I’m playing these scratch cards.'” Cryer said. “Crying, just crying. It was just amazing.”
Thus the dealer became the winner.
O’Hern says word spread quickly around the hospital.
“There was an incredible outburst and people were saying, ‘What’s happening, what’s going on?’ Usually something bad happened, but she couldn’t even talk,” O’Hern said. “It’s not always that you get joyful surprises on the oncology floor. Just to see that this is so different from what we see every day, and we can celebrate that with you.”
In the worst of times, Bury was the luckiest.
“It’s just… that’s how 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 going to be eighty,” she said.
