Oregon man beats cancer twice, then wins $4.6M lottery

Scottie Andrew, CNN by Scottie Andrew, CNN

Oregon Lottery

An Oregon man beat cancer. Then he beat it again. Then he won the lottery.

He seems to be his own lucky charm.

Stu MacDonald of Bend buys Oregon Lottery tickets every week, and every week, his wife Claudia tells him to “get the winning ticket.”

She forgot to tell him on Sept. 7, the Oregon Lottery said. But he ended up buying a winning ticket worth $4.6 million.

“I am a very lucky guy,” he said in a statement. “I survived cancer twice and here I am. This is amazing.”

After taxes, he took home about $1.5 million. A cafe where he purchased the quick pick ticket got a selling bonus of $46,000, the lottery said.

A spokesman for the Oregon Lottery told CNN that MacDonald hadn’t agreed to any interviews or to release any images of himself, so you’ll have to imagine the grin on his face when he found out about his winnings.

MacDonald is lucky, indeed. Winning the lottery is exceedingly rare.

The average person’s odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are 1 in 302,575,350. That’s about 292,200 times less likely than being born with extra digits (the odds are about 1 in 500).

Unlucky odds won’t stop people from trying to get lucky anyway. For one Canadian man, it worked: After playing the same numbers for 30 years, he finally won $60 million in October. He waited nearly 10 months to pick up his earnings, which he said he’d put toward a new home and a family vacation.