The Winning Ticket, Part 2

It's a Miracle 3: Extraordinary Real-Life Stories Based on the PAX TV Series It's a Miracle
by Richard Thomas

(Page 2 of 2)

But as her health improved, other worries began to wear Sandy down. Her doctor bills were mounting, and without health insurance, she couldn't afford continued therapy. And so, the moment she was well enough to walk, Sandy checked herself out of the hospital.

I wish you'd reconsider," the medical staff told her."I said, 'Hey, I got to pay the doctor, you know,' " Sandy states. "And so, I got out of the hospital on January sixth. I went to work on the seventh, with crutches."

"Sandy, what are you doing here?" an employee asked.

"I wanted to see how my restaurant was surviving without me," Sandy replied."Everybody thought I was crazy, because I was supposed to be doing my rehab therapy," she says. "I couldn't afford it. Because I was already out of the hospital, it would cost me about two or three hundred dollars a day to go to the rehab. So I said, this is my rehab, at work."

Even painful radiation treatments couldn't stop Sandy from working to pay off her bills.

"When I was in my radiation, I was working," she says. "I got up at 4:00 in the morning, went to work, opened the shop by 5:30, and got out of there five minutes before 1:00, to go to the hospital, get my radiation, and then go home. I had to pay the bills."

Sandy kept her financial problems to herself, until they became so severe that she turned to an old friend for advice.

"I remember one morning I came into the depot to get my usual cup of coffee," says Bill, "and she walked up with a brown paper bag, and she emptied these doctor bills.""Geez, these are all from the hospital?" Bill asked.

"And the doctors, and everything," Sandy conceded."There were thousands of dollars that she was being requested to pay," Bill recalls. "Obviously, she didn't have insurance, so this was coming out of her pocket."

"It's a lot of money. I don't know where I'll get the money from," she said.

"She didn't want to let any of her employees go; they had basically kept the store running while she was gone. So she put the doctors on a payment plan. It was a hundred bucks - a hundred bucks here, and a hundred bucks there," Bill explains. "And we would both be dead before she'd get them paid off."

Sandy had about as much of a chance of getting out of debt as her customers had of winning the lottery, but all that was about to change. Sandy needed a miracle, and, luckily, one was on the way.

"I was at work one day, and the lottery district salesperson called me and said, 'Hey, congratulations. You've finally sold a big one,' " Sandy says. "And I said, 'Oh, give me a break. Don't even bother with me. I'm so busy right now.' "

Sandy's lottery machine had sold a ticket worth close to one hundred thousand dollars.

"So, I picked up the phone and I called up Mom and Dad and I said, 'Hey, one of you guys win the big one, maybe? Because I sold a big one from my store.' So Dad checked and he said, 'No, not us.' And I said, 'Gee, I wonder who I sold that big one to?' " Sandy says.

"Half an hour later, everything quiets down, and I think, 'Hey, I could've sold it to myself.' "Sandy remembered that she'd bought some Fantasy Five tickets, shared with two other friends.

"My dad always told me, 'Don't ever quit, 'cause that's the time you're going to hit it.' So even as broke as I am, I have never quit," she reveals.

And when she checked the results, she realized her regular numbers had won.

"I was holding my head, saying, 'Oh, my God. I won; I've sold myself a winner.' And all the customers were asking 'Are you okay?' because I was holding my head, and so I got everybody's attention. And I was crying," Sandy remembers. "I said, 'You'll never believe it; I just sold myself a winner.' "

But just as quickly, she remembered that she'd already thrown the winning ticket away.

"At that time, they'd already dumped it into another trash can, which is a fifty-five-gallon trash can," she says. "I just went over there and pulled the whole trash bag out, and between me, the cashier, and the cook, we went through fifty-five gallons of trash, to find the winning ticket."

"Right here! Right here! I got it! I got it!" Sandy shouted.A short time later, Bill and Fred came by."Oh, my gosh! I've found the ticket!" Sandy told them excitedly.

"Hey, what are you screaming about?" they asked her.

"She was grinning like a Cheshire cat, and I said, 'What are you smiling about?' " Fred says. "And she said, 'I've won the lotto.' I kind of laughed at her and said, 'Oh, your machine's rigged; we know that's not possible.' "

"I won the lotto last night, and I threw it away. I threw it away! Come here, come here, tell them," Sandy said to her employees. "Tell them what we just did."

"Let me see," Bill and Fred asked her. She showed them the ticket.

"We looked at it, and sure enough, it was a winning ticket," Bill says. "We thought it was kind of funny because the shop gets a cut of the winnings - so, since she purchased the ticket at her shop, she gets the winnings plus a cut for selling the ticket to herself. So, of course, we told her that the whole thing was rigged."

"I get to pay my bills," Sandy said.

"Oh, man, that's great!" Fred congratulated her.

"I'm not sharing with you guys," Sandy declared."Okay," said Fred.

"Hey, wait a minute," Bill teased.

"The amount of money that she got for the winnings was enough to pay off her bills," says Bill, "so that was pretty close to being a miracle."

"If anyone deserved to win the lotto, it was Sandy," states Fred. "It wasn't like it was something that just happened to her. I believe it was her reward for working so hard and never giving up."

"It was just enough for me to pay the doctors back, and clear up all the bills, plus the credit card I was living on when I was in the hospital," Sandy confirms. "So, it came at the right time and I just said, Thank you, God. Somebody is watching out for me."

Today Sandy has completely recovered, and her problems - both medical and financial - are solved."

Now, if you didn't know she'd gone through surgery, you probably would never guess," says Fred. "It's incredible how quickly and how fully she's recovered."

"I go to church on Sundays, and I think He heard my prayer. Because all I wanted to do was pay the doctors off, and then I could start all over again," says Sandy. "So, I think that is a miracle."

"There was a large intervention from God in this whole thing," declares Bill. "He put us there with Sandy when she had the seizure, so that her medical aid was the quickest route possible. He gave her the incentive to fight this. And then, all of a sudden, there's money."

"The fact that the lotto winnings were the amount that they were, I believe is a kind of divine intervention," says Fred. "A huge ream of bills had been coming in and the winnings were almost exactly what she needed to pay, everything to the penny."

"I'm on medication for the rest of my life, but every day I wake up, I say thank you for waking up again. I can go to work like everybody else, and be surrounded by my friends," says Sandy. Friendship, your parents, your relatives around you - that's more important than anything else."

Copyright © 2003 by Selected and introduced by Richard Thomas.