€1.5m TV winner: I won't give up work
A British nurse today said she would not give up her £25,000 (€37,900)-per-year job, despite winning £1m (€1.5m) in a live television quiz show.
Karen Shand, 40, from Kirkcaldy, Fife, said she hoped to continue working in the coronary care unit in the town’s Victoria Hospital, after hitting the jackpot on last night’s The Vault programme.
“I love my job,” she told reporters at the hospital today. “I’ve been a nurse for 23 years. I did my training at the Victoria and just like to look after people.
“My colleagues have been just brilliant. It’s the talk of the hospital.”
Ms Shand clinched the life-changing prize after she answered six questions correctly when a studio contestant failed to hit the big time.
Of the phone call from presenter Gabby Logan to her modest bungalow in the town’s Viewforth Street, the nurse said: “I phoned in on the spur of the moment during the first break last night.
“I thought I should have every chance of getting the first two (questions), because they’d been on the show already. Three and four, I knew the answer straight away, the fifth one I struggled with, and the sixth one was just a gift.”
But she said winning the jackpot would not change her as a person.
“It will certainly change my lifestyle,” she said. “But it wouldn’t change me.”
Ms Shand is flying down to London today with her partner, William Logan, 47, a paramedic, and her daughter from a previous relationship, Amie, 16, to speak about the win on GMTV tomorrow morning.
She said the first thing she would spend her prize money on would be a holiday.
“We’ll go on holiday and then we will think about what to do when we’re there. I don’t think it’s sunk in yet, to be honest.
“It just doesn’t feel real. I can’t believe I’ve done it.”
Schoolgirl Amie was at her 47-year-old father Archie Shand’s house when she heard her mother vying for the top prize on the TV programme.
“I was watching it at my Dad’s and I didn’t even know she’d phoned in, so I was shocked and on the edge of my seat,” she said.
Top of her wish list is a shopping trip for her and her mother to New York to buy “loads of designer gear”.
Mr Logan, who has worked with the ambulance service in Fife for 22 years and has been with Ms Shand for just over a year, expressed his delight at the win.
“I was jumping about when she got the sixth question, but she was so calm,” he said. “I said to her this morning: ‘Have you got iced water in your veins?’
“But we haven’t slept all night. We have done that much talking. We’ve had things bought and changed our minds.
“We’ll be able to treat ourselves to some luxuries and stop working overtime. I think it’s going to be a great Christmas.”
Ms Shand answered the six questions with eight seconds to spare of the one-minute time limit.
TV presenter Gabby, who is married to Scots rugby ace Kenny Logan, said last night she was “so pleased to present Karen with this life-changing sum”.
“It’s wonderful that someone who has given so much through her job as a nurse now has the opportunity to put her feet up and enjoy herself,” she said.
