ALBANY - Shirley Hiebert wasn't afraid to die. She saw it as a joyous trip to heaven and freedom from agonizing pain.

But the Bible verse the Albany woman pored over as she lay in her hospital bed insisted it wasn't yet time.

"I have set before you life and death," the verse said, from the book of Deuteronomy. "Choose life."

Hiebert did.

And doctors say they now can find no trace of the cancer they believed was once ravaging her body.

It could have been an improper diagnosis, said Dr. Peter Kenyon, a Corvallis oncologist who worked with Hiebert while she was ill. Or perhaps the few weeks of chemotherapy did the trick.

Or, yes, he said, it could have been a miracle.

"Sometimes," he said, "it all works out."

It was just before Christmas 2003 when Hiebert started to feel sick.

She was 65 then and considered herself to be in relatively good health. But suddenly she found she had trouble walking up and down stairs.

Pain would shoot through her knees. Her leg muscles, once very strong, had begun to shrink.

Hiebert and her husband, Gene, were scheduled to leave for their annual trip to south. They usually spend about three months in California and Arizona each year.

The couple made the trip, and Hiebert contacted her doctor there for help with her leg problems. Arthritis, the doctor said. Get used to it.

Back home in Albany, a second doctor said the same, and sent her to arthritis specialists when the pain increased. Medication didn't help.

Then came stabbing pains in her left arm, shooting down to the fingertips. "I would wake up at night in excruciating pain," Hiebert recalled. "The doctor said I was just going to have to deal with it. He just didn't know what to do with me."

Gene took the doctor aside and told him how bad the pain really was, Hiebert recalled. The doctor listened, then ordered a CAT scan. That was in spring 2004.

Following the scan, the doctor sat down with the Hieberts. "Cancer has exploded in your lungs," he informed them. That's when Hiebert began seeing Kenyon, an oncologist with the Corvallis Clinic.

Hiebert had spots on her lungs, ribs and spine. Tests were inconclusive for cancer at first, both Hiebert and Kenyon said. The spots didn't fit the classic pattern.

But a specialist at Oregon Health & Science University diagnosed her with malignant lymphoma and recommended chemotherapy.

By this time, Hiebert said, the pain was so bad she was ready to call it quits on life. One night, even before chemotherapy began, she woke up with no idea of who or where she was. Her husband called an ambulance.

The cancer, doctors told him, was affecting her brain.

It was in the hospital, Hiebert said, as she began to come back to herself, that she reached for a Bible. Lord, I need something to help me, she remembers thinking.

She flipped to Deuteronomy, not a book she turns to often. A subheading in the middle of Chapter 30 caught her eye: "The Choice of Life or Death."

The New International Version of verses 19 and 20 read this way:

"This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live, and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."

"So I claimed it," Hiebert said. She remembers praying: This is going to be really hard. You're going to have to help me.

It turned out to be even harder than she imagined. She went through six weeks of chemotherapy. Her light brown hair fell out. She had no energy to leave her bed.

"She was dying," Kenyon recalls, "either from the disease or the treatment."

In October 2004, Kenyon stopped the treatment and sent Hiebert home. Fellow parishioners from Plainview Mennonite Church stopped in to pray and anoint her with oil. Gene told his wife he'd be arranging for hospice care.

She remembers telling him, "That's for dying people." He simply responded he needed the help.

Gene had actually begun his own private war with his wife's illness, and his battle plan included an arsenal of vegetables.

Basing his approach on a weight-loss plan called the "Hallelujah Diet," Gene eliminated all meat from his wife's diet, along with all processed and most cooked foods.

Each day, he fed her carrot juice by the gallon, until her skin turned orange. He would allow raw vegetables and fruits and the occasional baked potato.

When the weight on her already-petite frame dropped to 85 pounds, he consented to some protein, yogurt and cottage cheese.

Hiebert just remembers being mad that all three of their grown children had come home for Thanksgiving and a giant crab feast and she wasn't allowed more than a bite. "I'm watching all these people enjoying this feed …" she sighed.

No one, including Hiebert, can say for sure why, but over the next few months she began to feel better. She gained back weight and strength. Her hair began to return, short and dark. By early 2005, she had another CAT scan and her brain showed no anomalies.

Kenyon was no longer treating Hiebert by then but still has access to her medical records. Three months ago, he confirmed, a final CAT scan showed no more spots on her lungs.

"In our business, I would look at, yeah, the diagnosis was probably wrong," he said. "Another way to look at it is, yeah, a miracle occurred."

Hiebert believes it. She can practically run upstairs now. Her arm still hurts from time to time, but doctors have said that's nerve damage left over from the spinal tumors.

Now 67, she said she feels just like herself again.

"But I'm lazy," she said with a chuckle, confiding that she's no longer quick to make Gene a sandwich if he says he's hungry. "Now he calls me 'Princess.'"

She still eats mostly vegetables, although she's looking forward to ham at her daughter's house in California on Christmas Day. "I've started drinking coffee - and you've got to have cookies."

Hiebert was never afraid of death, and says she feels an even greater peace about it now. But she's treasuring the new life she appears to have been given, particularly at Christmastime.

"I'll just be thanking the Lord," she said. "I thank the Lord every day."