Longtime Friends Survive Tulsa Tornado At Whataburger

Sydney and Kaitlyn have been friends since middle school and shared many adventures, but they never imagined they’d find themselves together inside the eye of a tornado.

The thing that has them scared about the next storm is there was no warning for this one - one minute they're sitting, looking out the window thinking, ‘It's raining pretty hard,’ and the next minute the tornado was right on top of them.

"Literally, in the eye of the tornado, I'm just like, ‘I'm going to die,’" Sydney said.

Sydney, Kaitlyn and another friend were talking when all the windows of the Whataburger blew out at once, throwing them onto the floor.

Go Fund Me: Sydney and Kaitlyn medical fund

The tornado was dragging and pulling Sydney, so Kaitlyn jumped on top of her.

"I still didn't know it was a tornado. I have really bad anxiety so I'm freaking out. Kaitlyn was like squeezing me so tight, saying, ‘It's okay, it's just a tornado,’ trying to calm me down,” Sydney said.

Kaitlyn used her phone to Facetime with her mother and connected, so her mother saw the roof of the restaurant fly off during the call.

"In the middle of it, I wanted our parents to know we love them,” Kaitlyn said. “There's a chance we're dying and they're going to know."

A metal rod punctured Sydney and went into her back, miraculously missing vital organs and her spine, but requiring surgery to repair the damage.

She's supposed to start college at OSU this month.

"We just keep saying we're extremely blessed because there's just no explanation why I didn't get hit worse," Sydney said.

In some ways, the girls say they feel invincible because they survived a tornado, but they also say something as simple as a ring tone that sounds like a siren puts them on edge.