Worth. Every. Step.

BURN VICTIM VOWED ES TO WALK AT SON'S WEDDING |  A FREAK CAMPFIRE ACCIDENT LEFT TAMI CHMIELEWSKI FIGHTING FOR HER LIFE. INSIDE HER BRAVE RECOVERY-AND THE PROMISE SHE MADE TO GET ON HER FEET AGAIN

- JOHNNY DODD and WENDY GROSSMAN KANTOR

It was the end of a perfect day. That's what Tami Chmielewski remembers thinking last Aug. 28 as she stood around a campfire in Annandale, Minn., catching up with guests from the wedding she'd attended hours earlier. Chmielewski was recording a video of the gathering on her phone when she saw one of the guests approach the fire and pour an accelerant on it. A split second later her leggings and T-shirt ignited-and she was suddenly engulfed in flames. "The liquid acted like a blowtorch, and the flames just shot straight out at me," she recalls. Searing pain gripped her as skin from her face down to the soles of her feet caught fire. "My friend's husband tackled me to the ground," she says, "but the fire wouldn't go out. I can't even explain the pain. It was so excruciating, I was begging for someone to shoot me."

Nearly 40 percent of Chmielewski's torso and legs were covered in third-degree burns. And it was just the beginning of an ordeal that kept Chmielewski in the hospital for the next 63 days-fighting for her life, enduring a marathon of skin graft surgeries and undergoing painful physical therapy to learn how to regain the use of her legs. "I didn't know if I was going to lose my legs or if I was even going to walk again," she says. Through it all, the 51-year-old single mother of four (Boston, 29, twins Brooklyn and Brandi, 25, and Brody, 15) from Chandler, Ariz., had another important goal that kept her overcoming numerous setbacks: "I just wanted to be able to walk down the aisle with Boston on his wedding day."

Waking up in a Minnesota hospital after the fire accident, Chmielewski learned that first responders in the ambulance had to resuscitate her twice because she'd stopped breathing. Within hours her older sister Gail Jenson, a 59-year-old longtime nurse, arrived to help. "She was my guardian angel and stayed by my side the whole time," Chmielewski says. "The memories of all that will never go away."