Stephanie Decker's legs both crushed as she shields her two young children from storm ripping through their home
A woman who saved her two children by binding them together with a blanket and shielding them with her body as a tornado ripped apart their house in Indiana lost parts of both her legs, which were crushed by the falling debris, her husband has said.
Stephanie Decker, a 36-year-old sleep specialist, lost one leg from above the knee and the other from above the ankle, said her husband, Joe. She was in serious but stable condition at a Kentucky hospital.
The couple's eight-year-old son and five-year-old daughter survived Friday's storm unscathed.
"I told her, 'They're here because of you,'" Decker said by telephone from the University of Louisville hospital. "I let her know that nothing else matters. I said, 'You're going to be here for your kids, and you get to see them grow up.'"
Mr Decker, 42, was at Silver Creek high school in Sellersburg, where he teaches algebra, when the tornado hit. With storms expected, the school had been locked up and he was debating whether to try to race home. He exchanged a series of texts with his wife, urging her to get herself and their children into the basement of their home in Marysville.
"Then she sent me a text saying the whole house was shaking, and I texted her back and asked her if everything was OK," he said. "I asked her about six or seven times and got no response. That kind of freaked me out."
He said his wife told him later that she was in their walk-out basement, which had French doors leading outside and a wall of windows, when she saw the tornado approaching, moving across the family's 15-acre (six-hectare) plot. She had already tied a blanket around both children and to herself, and she threw herself on top of the children.
"She said she felt the whole house start to go, and then she felt like it moved them about before it kind of wedged her in there, but she was able to keep the kids from moving away," Joe Decker said.
When the tornado passed, she called to the children. Her daughter, Reese, answered immediately, but her son, Dominic, hesitated before saying he was OK. Joe Decker said his son told him he could not hear his mother because of the roar of the storm.
Dominic, however, soon ran across the street to seek help from neighbours, who had taken refuge in a storm cellar, Mr Decker said. One neighbour, realising the severity of Mrs Decker's injuries, ran for help and found a deputy sheriff who applied tourniquets to Mrs Decker's legs to halt her blood loss.
She has been scheduled to undergo surgery on her legs again on Thursday, said a hospital spokeswoman, Holly Hinson. "The house is gone. It's pretty amazing that she's alive," Hinson said.