Doctors told her that she had been found by a motorcyclist who had seen her lying on the side of a trail going down Sonoma Mountain and been transported by helicopter and medically evacuated to Santa Rosa.

She had a fractured neck and serious brain and back injuries. No one, least of all Ueng, knew how serious her situation was, the extent of her brain injuries, or whether she'd ever be able to work again.

"It was scary," says Richard Holcomb, a friend and chief executive of StrikeIron, a Durham software company. "You can't see brain trauma. So you have questions like, 'Will you remember again? Will there be a loss of mental capacity?' ... You don't realize how fragile the brain is. It's scary when you depend on it."

By the end of the week, Ueng was orchestrating her own crisis control from her hospital bed. Holcomb, who had flown out to California to be with her, had Ueng's Blackberry and was e-mailing her clients and associates, updating them on her progress, reassuring them that business would continue as usual, that Ueng was still in charge.

Within days she was out of the hospital, and back in Raleigh soon after. Doctors here told her it would be three months before she could go back to work, that she had to give her brain time to heal.

They hadn't counted on the "Grace factor."

"Whatever timetable the doctor gave her, she had the Grace timetable, which was substantially less," says Tom Hanlon, a friend and a client and CEO of AllShred.

Type A

Grace Ueng is a Type A. Driven. Hard working. Ambitious. The youngest daughter of Chinese immigrants, Ueng grew up in Atlanta. Her father was a professor at Georgia Tech but she remembers few luxuries as a child. She was studious from the start. Her seventh-grade science project was a study of the viscosity of molasses and other fluids. It placed in the regional competition. Her father wanted Ueng to be an engineer.

She ended up at MIT and won class president at the end of freshman year. At 23, she was in Harvard's business school.

She came to the Triangle 10 years ago and quickly earned a reputation as the one to call if you wanted to launch a new product, rebrand your company or expand your market share.

As the vice president of marketing for OpenSite Technologies, she led a campaign resulting in the Durham company's acquisition by Siebel Systems for $542 million. She did the same at other Triangle companies such as Togethersoft, which was acquired by Borland Software, and at SmartPath, which was sold to DoubleClick. She estimates that her work on the executive teams of various companies over the years has earned investors returns of at least $1 billion.

Three years ago, Ueng decided to start her own company. She began working her network to generate leads. Not hard for a woman with friends and associates around the globe. Savvy Marketing Group was still establishing itself when Ueng had her accident, but already her client list included some of the area's top companies -- Geomagic, John Deere, First Research, Alternate Access and AllShred.

When news of her accident reached the Triangle, it spread quickly through the business community, going from one e-mail in-box to another.

Her clients rallied around her.

Most saw her as a friend as well as a business associate. Jerry Heneghan, CEO of Virtual Heroes, was worried about her 9-year-old son, Nicholas.

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