EDITOR'S NOTE: Because of a computer error Monday night, this article was presented incorrectly in Tuesday's editions. We are reprinting it in its entirety today.

Ace Stryker

11She was vomiting freely. Blood had filled her lungs and she could catch only sharp, shallow breaths. Her eyes refused to focus on the family members hovering at her bedside. Her 5-foot frame had shriveled almost overnight to 70 pounds.

York was suffering from a form of choriocarcinoma, a rare cancer that develops in the tissue surrounding a fetus during pregnancy. The disease had spread through most of her body from a mole that formed inside her uterus just after conception five months before.

Though York would live through the night -- and decades more, becoming the first recorded survivor of her type of cancer and the subject of a Pulitzer Prize-nominated book written 25 years ago -- her unborn child would not.

York was born in 1935 in Salina. At 3 years old, she moved with her family to Spanish Fork, where her father took a job at the Deer Creek Dam. For the next 13 years, they bounced back and forth between Utah and California until settling in Orem.

Faye Drage, York's aunt, remembered her as "quite a happy person" as a youngster.

"I used to baby-sit with her and her brother sometimes," Drage said. "She was a cute girl."

That cuteness attracted Paul Crandall, a strapping young lad bound for the armed forces, whom she married in the summer of '51. But their bliss would only last a few months: By November, York had received her first portent of troubles ahead.

"I started feeling like, 'Uh-oh, something's not right in there,' " she said.

The couple visited the local physician, Dr. James Webster, who confirmed that York was pregnant. But any joy they derived from the news was sapped when York learned that a hydatidiform mole was also growing as the result of her body's overproduction of tissue.

In the following weeks, York's condition deteriorated rapidly. She couldn't keep food down. Her body withered until her legs atrophied and her father had to bear her around from place to place.

"He carried me around like I was a little doll," she recalled. "He would not let go of me."

Friends and family rallied, and at one point the entire town of Orem held a fast for little Rae Jean. Dr. Webster flew in two of the world's leading choriocarcinoma experts, but they gave a bleak prognosis in the face of a disease with a 100-percent fatality rate. By Christmas, York had cancer throughout most of her body, including a tumor on her brain stem.

The situation reached crisis point the night of Dec. 25, which doctors predicted would be her last. But just as her body was shutting down, York said a miracle occurred.

"I was in my bed and I could hear music," she said.

York remembered asking her father whether carolers had come. Her father checked in the family orchard out back, but found "not a soul," she remembered.

She cocked her head to one side -- the greatest movement her crippled body would allow -- and saw, instead of the farmhouse wall, a choir of a dozen angels singing to her.

"I was enamored with all of these angels that was with me," she said.

Certain the vision she was seeing meant her time had come, York steeled herself. But as they faded away and she remained confined to her bed, she said she knew it could have meant only one thing: Her baby boy had been taken.

York said Dr. Webster, who has since died, noticed immediate improvement in her condition the next day. In January, he took her to a medical facility in Salt Lake City. There specialists administered cobalt, a radioactive treatment -- but it backfired, York said.

"It just devastated me," she said.

The family opted to go without treatment and see what happened. For reasons nobody could quite explain, the 16-year-old girl's body began beating back the cancer that nobody else had ever survived, even with the latest medical advances. In the summer of 1952, she was showing real signs of progress.

"The lesions are dissipating," Webster told her after looking at X-rays during a routine checkup. "I think you're beating this thing."

By fall, York felt well enough to move with her husband to California, where he was stationed at Fort Ord. They later divorced, and she was remarried in 1959 to her current husband, Raedell.

In 1983, renowned Mormon author Ora Pate Stewart penned York's life story in a book called "I Will Wait Till Spring." The self-published tome sold 10,000 copies in the first week and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

But York said the best part of all the years she's been given since the cancer ordeal was the opportunity to become a mother. As a nurse at American Fork Hospital in 1968, she helped deliver a baby boy and later adopted him when his young mother resigned him to more capable hands. Physically unable to bear children after the cancer, she said the experience of delivering Steven was equivalent to her own childbirth.

"Steven is the shining light in my life," she said.

• Ace Stryker can be reached at 344-2556 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it