He looks at his disfigured body — rarely in a mirror, that's too hard — and thinks of Salim Amara, the man who did this to him.

"Why couldn't you have been suicidal?" Nelson wonders about Amara. "Why did you have to hurt people you didn't know?"

Ten years ago, on a Sunday afternoon in April, Nelson, then 29, and his fiancee, Heather Gallagher, 24, boarded a Madison Metro bus after shopping for clothes at West Towne Mall. Amara, a 20-year-old homeless man with a mounting rap sheet, sat farther back, a bucket of gasoline at his feet.

Amara would later tell a psychiatrist that the devil was out to get him. Voices in his head told him so.

As the voices grew louder, he thought they were coming from Nelson. Amara walked down the aisle and emptied the bucket on Nelson, soaking Gallagher, too. Then he smiled, and lit a match.

There were six people on the bus that day —

Nelson, Gallagher, Amara, passengers Rodney Scribner and Ernestine Wittig and bus driver

William "Gary" Isom. All were seriously injured, but Nelson the most, with burns on more than 97 percent of his body.

Doctors gave him almost no chance of surviving. The fire seared his face, melting his nose and half of one ear.

Anger fueled his recovery. "Hate can be a very strong motivator, a very necessary motivator," Nelson says today.

He went on to marry his fiancee, now known as Heather Gallagher-Nelson. The couple moved to Galveston in 2001, in part because their injuries made it painful to endure cold weather.

In a development doctors thought impossible, they conceived a child. Dylan, 3, an exuberant boy who eats the rinds off oranges and runs around the house turning on lights as fast as his parents can shut them off, was born healthy.

"I want people to know that we're happy, that we have a great family," said Gallagher-Nelson, who was burned over 87 percent of her body. "Everyone in Madison did a small part of making that happen."

Unconditional love

On a recent afternoon, with temperatures nearing 80 degrees, Nelson, now 39, chased his son around the Galveston Railroad Museum, one of Dylan's favorite destinations. Nelson is tall — 6 feet 2 — and thin, with an agility that matches his son's. Together, they climbed rail cars, blew a train whistle and sat in a conductor's seat.

After a time, blood dripped onto Nelson's khaki shorts. He had scratched a wrist.

"That's common at our house," said Gallagher-Nelson, 34. "We'll find someone tracking around blood, so we all stop and say, 'OK, everybody check themselves.'"

Their skin, a patchwork of grafts, tears easily and heals with difficulty.

The fire on April 19, 1998, sent the victims fleeing into the street. Terrified children playing nearby yelled "stop, drop and roll!" Residents ran from their houses with blankets and pitchers of water.

Police caught Amara a few blocks from the scene, dazed and burned. He was later found not guilty by reason of mental disease and confined to a state mental institution for up to 104 years, where he remains.

Nelson and his wife have been largely out of the media's eye since Dec. 6, 1999, when they married aboard a Miami cruise ship. They agreed to this interview, they said, so they could express the immense gratitude they feel toward so many people in the Madison area — not just the paramedics, police officers, hospital workers and court officials but also the thousands of people who sent cards and attended fundraisers.

"Especially when you're coming to terms with looking like this, it was really amazing to have all of these people love you unconditionally," Nelson said.

The couple retains a zone of privacy. They do not let journalists write about or photograph the inside of their house. "You have to have some boundaries," Nelson said.

Months of surgeries

They don't know how many skin-graft surgeries they've endured — she stopped counting in the 20s, he stopped at 50. They estimate their hospital bills neared $5 million, most of them covered by insurance.

During Gallagher-Nelson's last surgery in 2000, UW Hospital surgeons amputated the second toe on her left foot and fashioned it into a thumb for her right hand so she could write. She lost the original thumb and a pinky in the blaze.

Unlike her husband's full-body injuries, Gallagher-Nelson was burned from the chest down, sparing her face. When she wants to, she can cover her scars with clothes, a situation with mixed implications.

"When you can hide it, you can choose not to deal with it," she said.

She spent years in therapy and anticipates taking anti-depressants the rest of her life for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Most of the time, Gallagher-Nelson wears sleeveless blouses and sun dresses, making no effort to conceal her scars. Part of this is out of practicality — both she and her husband overheat easily because grafted skin can't sweat — but she also wants other burn victims to see her and realize they can regain some normalcy in their lives.

Nelson's last surgery was in 1999 when doctors scraped a calcium deposit off his right elbow that had grown due to immobilization. He was heavily sedated for the first six months of his initial hospitalization to keep him comfortable while on life support.

Once or twice a year, chronic pancreatitis fells him, shutting down his digestive system. This is the most serious physical remnant of his injuries and requires a hospital stay to coax his pancreas back.

Nelson's doctors suspect he suffered an attack of viral pancreatitis during his initial hospitalization that went undetected because it mimicked other symptoms from the fire.

'They're just looks'

Nelson has rejected all surgeries that would be considered strictly for vanity reasons. He came close to having his nose reconstructed, but the projected "after" photos disappointed him, and he runs a higher risk of infections and surgery complications due to his burns.

"Looks are just that — they're just looks," he said. "I'm not saying I don't appreciate beauty, but after spending a year in a hospital, when you look at what you're going to get for the pain, I couldn't do plastic surgery."

Would he rather not look the way he does? Certainly, he said. He avoids seeing his reflection because it can bring him down. He uses humor to ease awkward situations.

At a SuperTarget recently, a little boy pointed at him and said, "Look at the monster." Nelson smiled back and said, "Argh, I'm the Cookie Monster."

(Dylan has yet to comment on or ask about his father's scars. "To him, I'm just different. There is no negativity," Nelson said.)

More than one stranger has asked Nelson if he's a leper.

"A fair amount of people are shocked when they see me walking down the street. There are always going to be idiots of some sort out there, to put it nicely. Most people are curious but fairly accepting."

His wife repeatedly tells him looks don't matter. "I don't see the scars. I see the person he was before."

Gallagher-Nelson's mother, Rosemary Gallagher, who moved to the Galveston area from Phoenix in 2005 to be closer to them, said she never doubted the two would marry. "They fought the odds. I knew if they both made it, they would be together for life."

A move, and a surprise

At the largest fundraiser for the victims in 1998, a crowd of up to 15,000 people attended a benefit at Elver Park, raising more than $100,000. Ultimately, each of the five victims received $37,315.

Nelson and his wife used most of theirs for a down payment on a Madison condo. After a lengthy rehabilitation, Gallagher-Nelson returned to her job at the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene, where she evaluated Pap smears for cancer. Nelson began trying to work a few hours at Full Compass Systems, an entertainment technology company where he had been retail manager.

They wanted to stay in Madison but cold weather exacerbated their post-trauma arthritis. "We fought it as long as we could," Nelson said.

They moved in 2001 when Gallagher-Nelson was recruited by a mentor, former Madisonian Dr. Roberto Logrono, to work in the cytopathology lab at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. She trains medical students on diagnosing cancer at the cellular level.

Nelson is a stay-at-home dad who picks at renovating the family's 1913 Victorian home. He is on private and federal disability insurance and must carefully balance exertion and rest.

Dylan's arrival stunned everyone — the couple was not expected to be able to conceive given the shock to their internal organs. "Remember, our bodies were basically broiled," Nelson said.

Once pregnant, Gallagher-Nelson became a source of medical curiosity and worry. Of particular concern was whether the skin grafts on her stomach could tolerate so much stretching.

Ultimately, she had minimal complications. Dylan now consumes their free time. He is tall like his father and just as outgoing. When Nelson is asked what he does to boost his mood, he points to his son, playing nearby. "See that boy smiling at me? That goes a long way."

The couple does not plan to have more children. "One big surprise was enough," Gallagher-Nelson said.

Anger, then acceptance

At the 1999 court hearing when Amara was committed to a mental institution, Nelson lashed out at his attacker.

"You are the weakest pile of evil bile I have ever seen, hiding behind your pail of gasoline," Nelson told Amara. "If you are ever out there, I will crush you."

Today, Nelson winces at the words. "Yes, to some extent, I regret them a little. But at the time, they needed to be said."

His wife puts it this way: "You go through a lot of stages. Anger had its purpose. It pushed us both through the pain of the physical therapy. Now, there is more acceptance."

They both speak charitably of Amara, who was found by doctors to have paranoid schizophrenia.

"Ten years out, I can say it was not Salim Amara who attacked us, it was Salim Amara's disease," Nelson said. "He is as much a victim as we are."

Their suffering would serve a greater good if it helped improve access to mental health services, they said. "It seems like someone has to hurt a lot of people before they get the help they need," Gallagher-Nelson said.

People sometimes ask them what they've learned through the ordeal. Nelson said the lessons are the simple ones — live fully in the moment, take nothing for granted, love and be loved.

"It would be very easy for me to dwell on what happened, to say, 'poor me, poor me.' But that's not living," he said. "So I'm out there. I'm not living behind a veil. In life, you really do have a choice of being who you are or hiding in a closet. It's really no fun hiding."