For a British couple from County Durham in the north of England, it was a Christmas present of a lifetime. John and Allison McDonald of Stockton-on-Tees had had a rough year, especially since their youngest son Ewan was still waiting for the all-clear from the doctors after a year of cancer treatment.
Yet within days, they not only discovered that they had won the 2 million pound (US$2,513,320) national lottery jackpot, but also that their son Ewan, 15, was declared cancer-free after a battle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
