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Heroic Mum Who Lost Legs Recalls Tornado Terror

Heroic Mum Who Lost Legs Recalls Tornado Terror

A mother who lost both her legs protecting her children from a tornado that ripped apart their home has described how she feared she would die while waiting for them to get help.

Stephanie Decker fashioned a tourniquet to stem the bleeding while she waited for eight-year-old son Dominic and five-year-old daughter Reese to return.

"I have to live for my kids," she told reporters she remembered saying to herself as she waited.

Mrs Decker's legs were crushed by a steel beam as she used her body to cover them up as they sheltered from the storm in the basement of their three-storey house in Henryville, Indiana.

"I knew this was going to be a bad storm," she said.

At least 39 people were killed, 13 of them in Indiana, as tornadoes swept through the central United States on Friday.

After the storm passed, Mrs Decker sent Dominic to get help from the neighbours and Reese went with him.

While they were gone she tried to use her mobile phone to call for help. Unable to get a signal, she instead chose to record a video message for her husband in case she died.

When she eventually heard voices outside she screamed: "Help me. Help me. Help
me."

Mrs Decker was taken to a local hospital before being flown to University Hospital in Louisville.

"The next thing I knew I woke up and I was alive," she said.

The 36-year-old sleep specialist lost one leg from above the knee and the other from above the ankle.

She has already set herself the goal of walking again in the next few months but she realises her life will never be the same.

"I'm the same person but I learned a lot," she told reporters fom her hospital bed.

However, she said she was concerned about the impact the storm would have on her children.

"I still worry how they are going to react," she said.