CONWAY SPRINGS ? With a monster tornado bearing down on her last weekend, Diane Neises sought refuge in the windowless interior bathroom of her manufactured home and locked her arms around the toilet.

The water lines snapped, she felt herself being lifted up, and something hit her on the back of the head. She was knocked out and doesn’t know exactly what happened next, but believes the storm carried her half a mile away, where two storm chasers found her.

She’s safe now after suffering cuts to her head and body, three broken ribs and eye injuries. She said she felt lucky to be alive, but she’s still hesitant to return to her home.

Bill Kunze and Travis Scales of Hutchinson had been out traveling back roads Saturday night, tracking the violent storms moving through parts of Kansas.

As darkness fell around 8:30 p.m., the two men were making their way slowly around downed power lines south of Wichita near Conway Springs when they saw something moving, what they first thought was a staggering animal. But as they got closer they realized it was a woman, covered with blood, her clothing torn.

Kunze and Scales got a quilt around the incoherent Neises, put her in the back seat of their pickup and took her to a rescue crew.

The first recollection that Neises has is being asked by an ambulance crew member whether she knew she’d been through a tornado.

The 46-year-old woman got a warning about the approaching storms in a telephone call from her mother, but with no rain even falling where she was then, she told her, “Oh, Mom, it’s not doing anything.”

But later she looked out the window and saw a huge funnel cloud, just half a mile away. She watched it chew up a neighbor’s house, one of a dozen Sumner County homes destroyed by the storms.

Neises, resting Wednesday at a relative’s home in Clearwater, said she was reluctant to go back to what used to be her home.

“I don’t know that I could handle it emotionally,” she said.