(CNN) — After 36 years as a nurse, one Kentucky woman had more than earned her retirement — and now she has plenty of money to retire in style.
That’s because she had no sooner retired than she bought a ticket and won a $200,000 lottery prize.
“It was unbelievable,” she said in a news release from the Kentucky Lottery. “I had just retired that day. I saw this as a sign it was meant to be for me to quit working.”
Kentucky Lottery officials say the woman, who asked to remain anonymous, bought the $10 Tree-Mendous Winnings Scratch-off game at a convenience store in Prestonburg, in the eastern part of the state.
She played the game in the store and saw that she’d matched the number 20 on the last row of the ticket. Then she scratched off the box to reveal that she’d won the game’s top prize.
The winner told lottery officials that the final two years of her three-decade nursing career were spent dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic.
“It’s been tough,” she said.
Kentucky has reported 757,016 Covid-19 cases and 10,104 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The winner made the three-hour drive to lottery headquarters in Louisville last week to pick up her prize, which after taxes came out to $142,000.
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