By Jane Erlkson
The Arizona Daily Star
   A Flagstaff teen is crediting her family, friends and faith in God for her remarkable recovery from the severe head injury she suffered in a collision on this date last year.
   "It was Friday the 13th," Catherine Daulton recalled yesterday in her slightly halting speech, one of the few remaining signs of her ordeal.
   Catherine, now 18, was nearly killed when another car broadsided the car in which she and a friend had traveled from Flagstaff to a church meeting in Tucson.
   Her friend, Amber Hawkes, was taken to Tucson Medical Center with a fractured pelvis.
   Catherine was taken to University Medical Center, where doctors told her parents she stood little chance of surviving.
   "Medically, her prognosis was absolutely bleak," her father, Joseph Daulton, said yesterday. "Doctors told us if she lived, she would be a vegetable."

   Catherine stood a 40 percent chance of succumbing to brain death. Someone brought up the prospect of organ donation - a prospect her deeply religious parents refused to consider.
   "She's going to be needing every one of her organs," was her father's determined response.
   UMC's trauma team took aggressive steps to optimize Catherine's chance of recovery, placing her on a ventilator to maxirnize the amount of oxygen getting to her injured brain.
   Thirteen days after her accident, on Feb. 26th, Catherine - then in a nursing home back in Flagstaff - opened her eyes.
   On April 15, she responded to questions for the first time since her accident.
   "My voice wasn't working right. I couldn't talk," she explained yesterday. "So I held up one finger for yes and two fingers for no."
   Catherine kept up with her schoolwork, she said, even while she was unconscious, when a friend read to her from her science textbook.
   By July, she was able to work with her
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Recovery

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books herself.
   Catherine plans to graduate from high school this year.
   She wants to be a writer. Her first goal is to finish a romance novel she began writing when she was 13. Then she plans to begin work on an autobiography.
   Yesterday, she and her family and friends were back at UMC to celebrate her recovery with the hospital staff who cared for her last year.
   "I'm thrilled," said Dr. Steven Johnson, a UMC trauma surgeon who cared for Catherine.
   "To see a patient come back from that level of injury, to be doing this well and be able to talk and interact with us, it's just wonderful," Johnson added. "Yeah, she beat the odds."
   Catherine's joy was just as obvious.
   "I owe everything to the Lord and my friends and family," she said. "It's going to be uphill the rest of the way."