Woman wins £1 million lottery jackpot just before getting cancer all-clear

An NHS worker who was undergoing treatment for breast cancer won a £1m lottery jackpot shortly before getting the all-clear from doctors.

Maxine Lloyd, an occupational therapist from Kettering, Northamptonshire won the money on the National Lottery's £30 million Mega Cash Showdown Instant Win game.

The 50-year-old woman was lying on a hospital bed receiving radiotherapy when she got a message from her bank stating that £1 million had been transferred into her account, per SkyNews.

Within two weeks of winning the jackpot, Lloyd rang the bell to mark the end of her cancer treatment. "The timing – everything has just been surreal with the timing," said the woman about the unexpected development.

"I'm here, I'm alive, and we've just had a bit of a cherry on the top of the cake really," she added.

Explaining how she managed to win the prize, Llyod said: "It was a game of three parts with two mystery numbers and on the second part it came up with two numbers and revealed £1 million and I just sort of carried on playing because I didn't quite get it."

"I didn't process it – I finished the game and it said 'Congratulations, phone this number', but I thought 'I can't, it's one in the morning,'" she added. The woman got the confirmation about her lucky win the next day.

She said that the first thing she bought with the winnings was an iWatch. Llyod and her fiancé, Wayne Tilbury, are also planning to buy a house. The couple also wants to buy a "girlfriend" for their two-year-old German Shepherd, who has been their biggest support during all this time.

The couple did not want to go public initially but decided to do so to create awareness around breast cancer. "I'm really passionate that if one woman, or man, goes and just checks their skin or their breast... if there's anything different, let the specialist tell you that – which is what they did to me," explained Lloyd.