BUTLER TWP — Isabelle Stephens should have only lived to be 22, but she said God sent his legions of angels to care for her more than six decades ago when her life was miraculously spared.

Stephens, of Butler Township, is spending the month of June celebrating her survival 65 years ago, when a devastating tornado dropped from the Kansas sky and onto the car in which she was riding.

“The wind was going 140 mph,” the spry octogenarian said. “It threw me out of the car and landed me 500 feet away through a wire fence.”

She explained she and the driver of the vehicle had stopped at a rest area on June 10, 1958, in El Dorado, Kan., gassed up their car, and reentered the turnpike when the eye of a major tornado descended from above and onto their car.

The twister removed almost everything she was wearing and deposited her in a field. The driver was also thrown in the tornado and survived, Stephens said.

As she lay bleeding and unconscious, a man on his way home from work decided to drive his truck through the same field, as his normal route was blocked by tornado damage.

On his unusual commute, the man happened upon the seemingly lifeless body of a young woman.

“He picked me up and put me in his truck,” Stephens said.

On the way to the hospital, the truck suffered a flat tire.

“He did not stop because he knew my life was hanging in the balance,” she said.

When medical personnel examined the still-unconscious Stephens upon her arrival at the emergency room, they deemed her lifeless and sent her to the worst place imaginable.

“I was in a temporary morgue because the hospital was just full of people from the storm,” she said.

She was told that on the third day of lying motionless in the temporary morgue, “a group of doctors walked out with their hands behind their backs and they said to themselves ‘Well, we lost another one,’” according to Stephens.

But a nurse decided to attempt one more method of detecting life, which the doctors had not tried.

“She put a mirror under my nose,” Stephens said.

When the mirror fogged up from the seemingly dead woman’s breathing, the nurse shouted “She’s alive!”

“This was all told to me,” Stephens said. “I don’t remember a thing.”

Stephens was transferred to a hospital room, and remained unidentified for two weeks and unconscious for three weeks.

The first thing she remembers is a doctor walking into her room and informing her it was the Fourth of July.

Not realizing she was in the hospital, she argued that it couldn’t be Independence Day because she didn’t hear any bands or parades outside.

Police had managed to identify her through the license plate of the car she had been riding in — which was rolled up like a cigarette — and the engraving on her wedding ring.

Stephens learned many bones on her right side were broken and she suffered a head wound in the tornado.

An El Dorado couple, Dale and Edith Hummel, met her mother at the Wichita airport after Stephens was identified, and welcomed her into their home as she visited her daughter in the hospital every day for a week.

After her mother left, the Hummels stayed with Stephens all day and evening in the hospital, only going home for meals and to sleep.

“That’s the kind of people they are in Kansas, and that’s the kind of people Dale and Edith Hummel were,” Stephens said.

After two months in the hospital in El Dorado, which is in Butler County, Kansas, nurses at the hospital dressed their patient — who they called their ‘little one” — in clothes donated by charities for an airplane ride home to her native Johnstown.

But the ongoing storms kept delaying the flight.

“That upset me,” Stephens recalled.

Her bad luck continued when she finally got on a small plane to head home, as the plane malfunctioned and the pilot was forced to land in a cornfield near Washington, D.C.

Stephens and her entourage stayed in a motel overnight while the plane was repaired, and she finally arrived in Johnstown.

There, an ambulance met the small aircraft and ferried Stephens to the hospital in Johnstown, where she finally got to see her mother and other loved ones.

Stephens remained under the care of Johnstown doctors and was in and out of the hospital there for more than three months.

“All totaled, it was 198 days,” she said of her medical care 65 years ago.

She was told by doctors she could never work, drive or walk, but since being released from care on Valentine’s Day, 1959, Stephens has had no medical issues resulting from the tornado.

“God was looking after his children, and I was one of his children,” Stephens said. “He sent his angels.”

She said it is not for us mere mortals to understand why bad things happen, like the tornado in 1958 that killed 13 people and injured many more.

“It could have been the devil. I don’t know,” Stephens said. “But it was God’s will that I got better.”

She traveled back to Kansas and was honored by El Dorado city leaders, and placed flowers on the graves of all those killed in the tornado that so grievously injured her.

She came to Butler County to live in 1982 and wrote a book in 2009 about the tornado titled “A Life That Almost Wasn't.”

Stephens often thinks about her experiences 65 years ago and the outpouring of love and care she received afterward.

She continues to enjoy excellent health in her Butler Township home.

“I consider every day a gift from God,” she said.