Nicholas Cruz knew little or nothing about Make-A-Wish Foundation prior to being diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma a little more than a year ago.

Now he knows firsthand what miracles the organization can perform.

Thursday, the 18-year-old Elizabethtown resident got his wish: the total restoration of his tired and battered 1993 Ford Mustang.

"I've never had anything this big happen to me," Nicholas said Friday as he sat behind the wheel of the car, which looked as if it had just come out of a showroom. "I'm out of words."

His mother, Janet, bought him the teal-colored Mustang — complete with dents, dings and rust — last December, while he was undergoing chemotherapy for the cancer.

"I brought it home on a cold December night, and Nick was so sick all he could do was come to the window and look at it," his mother said. "He couldn't even go outside."

She knew he loved Mustangs, and the car was incentive to complete his treatments.

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Nicholas, then 17, had been diagnosed a few weeks earlier and had undergone surgery at Hershey Medical Center.

It was the medical center's staff who put him in touch with Make-A-Wish one week before his 18th birthday; had it been a few days later, he would have been ineligible for the program.

"Nick got in right at the tail end," Mrs. Cruz said.

Mrs. Cruz said the car-improvement idea came to her as she thought about her husband, Robert, who died in July 2002 in a car accident. He loved to work on automobiles, she said. In fact, a Pontiac GTO he was restoring still sits in the family garage.

Nicholas' "dad was into cars a lot," she said.

In September, Nicholas and his mother took the car to Chester County Auto Body in Malvern, which was to do the restoration.

Mrs. Cruz received periodic updates on the work but kept them secret from her son.

Finally, last week — already knowing the restoration had been completed — she told Nicholas that if she did not hear anything soon, she would "make a surprise trip down there to see what the heck's going on."

"So I started setting this thing up," she said.

Thursday, they made the "surprise" visit. However, the surprise was on Nicholas. When mother and son pulled in to the body shop, a crowd of people was waiting.

"Nick had no idea, even at that time," Mrs. Cruz said.

Then he spotted balloons and, he said, he realized "Mom had set me up."

The car was covered, and he was asked to help unveil it.

"As soon as I started seeing the front of it, I was amazed," he said. "It's a total transformation."

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The teal-blue rust bucket had been painted high-gloss black with wide, red stripes running bumper-to-bumper down the middle of the vehicle.

The car was lowered 3 inches and now sports new body work, a spoiler and a Cobra SVO hood. New chrome wheels shine in the light, and the car has dual exhausts and sporty new European headlights and taillights.

The interior was redone and the seats reupholstered to match the red-and-black exterior.

"It turned out great," he said. "The color combination and all, I really love red and black."

One thing Nicholas did retain from the "old" Mustang was its steering-wheel cover.

"It came off my dad's Jeep, which he actually died in," the boy said. "Miraculously enough, it fit perfectly on my steering wheel. It meant a lot to me."

Laurian Halter, wish coordinator for the Philadelphia and Susquehanna Valley chapter of Make-A-Wish Foundation, said Nicholas was "extremely excited" when he saw the car.

"You could tell that he'd been waiting for this a long time," she said. "With some of our wishes, you never really know if it's what the child wants, or if it was just the first thing that came to mind.

"But with Nick, you could definitely tell that he was absolutely into this."

Nicholas, who was in public school until he became ill and is now enrolled in a cyber school, hopes to go to a technical school after graduation and study automotive repair or metal fabrication. He has finished his chemotherapy treatments and is being monitored by his doctors.

Friday, he said his dream would not have been realized if it had not been for the people at Make-A-Wish.

"I couldn't be happier with what they did for me," he said. "I've never received a gift this big before."

E-mail: lalexander@lnpnews.com