Ten months after losing his foot in a motorcycle accident, Rhett Avant walked back into the bay, put his gear on the rig, and got to work.
Merced, CA (February 27, 2026) — On the morning of February 18, 2026, Rhett Avant walked back into that bay for the first time in nearly a year as a full-duty firefighter. He stopped at the back of the rig, took a breath, and looked around.
“We’re doing this,” he told himself. “This is awesome. I’m actually putting my gear on the rig.”
He had earned every heart beat of that moment. Ten months earlier, on a road east of Merced, with his foot mangled and his blood pooling on the asphalt, Rhett Avant had done something that still stops people in their tracks when they hear it: he tourniqueted his own leg, called 911, gave dispatchers his location, and then phoned his best friend at the fire department to let the crew know what had happened, all before the ambulance arrived.
Good Friday
April 18, 2025 was Good Friday. Rhett was on his motorcycle when he came into a turn and caught the last rear dual on a semi-trailer. The impact flipped him, spun him, and dropped him in the middle of the road.
“I looked down and holy crap, my foot’s mangled,” he recalled.
What followed was not panic. It was protocol. He butt-scooted himself to the shoulder so he wouldn’t get hit again.
Bystanders pulled up. Some spoke broken English. One was already calling 911. Rhett directed them to his motorcycle’s saddle bag, where he kept a full medical kit. He took over the 911 call from a bystander, gave the dispatcher his precise location, and asked them to notify the Merced City Fire Chief that a firefighter was down.
“Then I ended up taking my phone. I took a picture of my foot. I ended up calling my best friend here at the fire department. He was on shift, we were going on duty that morning.”
The message was simple and devastating.
“I was in a motorcycle accident. I’m probably going to lose my foot. Let everybody know.”
He made one more call, to his wife’s best friend, who almost never answers that early. She picked up. He told her what happened and asked her to be with his wife. She said yes.
He never lost consciousness.
“I never had the adrenaline rise or dump,” he said. “I felt it the whole route,”
At the hospital in Modesto, he asked the ER doctor directly: “You can’t save my leg?”
The answer was no. He said simply, “Okay, go ahead and take it.”
The Decision
The initial amputation was performed at the ankle joint, what surgeons call a guillotine amputation. Within days, Avant and his wife began researching next steps. They learned that bringing the amputation to just below the knee, could offer better mobility and long-term function.
They consulted prosthetics representatives and surgeons. Three days later, he underwent a second surgery and went home a week later.
The harder decision was still to be made. Weeks into recovery, an option was placed before him and his wife: accept a financial settlement and walk away from firefighting, or attempt to fight his way back to full duty.
“It was a huge life decision,” he said. “It was the one time the wife and I had to sit there and actually kind of like, all right, what are we going to do?”
They prayed. They thought. They weighed it.
Then, one night, while scrolling through YouTube, Avant came across a Stockton Fire Department video. A firefighter kicked in a door. Flames blew outward.
“I looked at the wife and I was like, there’s no way I’m not going back to this,” he said. “Like, I have to.”
There was no bitterness in his voice when he described that moment. No resentment. Only clarity.
“There wasn’t another option.”
The Rebuild
Recovery was not passive. The physical rebuild was equally relentless. Rhett found The Amp Group, a gym in Modesto built specifically for amputees and people with disabilities. Founded and operated in part by individuals in the prosthetics field, The Amp Group is equipped with parallel walking bars, free weights, and adaptive equipment. Rhett describes it as one of the most critical elements of his recovery.
“I couldn’t have done it without that,” he said. “Going there daily and learning how to walk , and walk smoothly, and carrying odd weights, it was everything.”
His prosthetist became his collaborator. Because Rhett’s goals included not just walking, but climbing ladders, running into fires and carrying equipment, standard fittings weren’t going to be enough. His prosthetist has the ability to 3D print custom sockets. He’d print one, hand it to Rhett, and tell him to try and break it. Rhett would put it to the test and come back with the results, helping to perfect the design.
He also connected with a firefighter in Massachusetts who had returned to duty after an amputation. The two exchanged information, compared prosthetic solutions and learned from each other’s trial and error.
“That was huge,” Avant said. “Having somebody in your corner that is very proactive… and push you as hard as you want to be pushed.”
Through grants from the Heather Abbott Foundation, Avant obtained a running blade to rebuild conditioning. He now rotates between multiple prosthetic components depending on activity: a daily-use foot with spring for agility; a weight-bearing foot that lives inside his turnout gear to eliminate bounce on ladders; a 3D-printed leg suited for water and sand; and a running blade for training.
“There’s a quick disconnect,” he explained. “Just a quarter turn and then the foot comes out.”
Each piece is attached via a locking pin system. “I can hang upside down from these legs and it’ll stay on,” he said.
Back on the Rig
Before returning to full duty, Avant spent two months on light duty training across shifts, working out alongside crews to prepare for the formal return to work test.
“I realized that this is a very unique thing,” he said. “If somebody else had gotten hurt, I would be concerned: can that person still pull me out? I love them to death as a brother, but realistically, can they do the things to get me out?”
The crew, for their part, has treated him exactly the way he’d want to be treated: like nothing changed. Someone hid his leg on a kitchen shelf because he was giving them a hard time.
“That’s what I love about it.”
And the love of the work, if anything, that has grown for Rhett.
“Any call that I run, no matter if it’s a lift assist or a structure fire… I am jazzed just to be running calls. When you fight so long to get into this job, and then get somewhere where you’re like, all right, this is it. God willing, I’m going to retire from here, and then have that almost taken away from you… to get it all back. It just feel more vibrant at the job. I love it.”
Riding Again
Returning to riding required its own engineering effort. The accident took his left foot which he uses for shifting. The solution he found is an electronic shifter, a product from Pingel Shifters, that uses a hydraulic ram mounted on the frame and a toggle switch on the handlebars. Up and down. No foot required.
But that brought a new problem: with no ankle articulation on the left side, he couldn’t kick back the kickstand the way a rider normally would. So Rhett is currently finishing the installation of an air-ride system with a center stand. He presses a button, the air lets out of the rear shocks, the stand descends and the bike settles. No kicking required. He also has two choppers in process, rigged for a foot clutch and a jockey shift.
He found the solutions the same way he found his prosthetic solutions: through community. He found his tribe of amputee motorcycle riders on social media, people bouncing ideas off eachother in comment sections with the same generosity he’s encountered everywhere he’s turned.
“Motorcycle riders, we all want to see somebody get back on the road,” he said.
Firehouse, Faith, Family, and Fear
During his recovery, Avant said the brotherhood of the fire service proved to be more than a phrase, it was daily action. For nearly three months, he said there wasn’t a single day without someone from the department stopping by his home, bringing supplies, checking in, or simply sitting with him. For Avant, the recovery confirmed what he had always believed about the firehouse: it is not just a workplace, but a family bound by trust, loyalty, and an unspoken commitment to carry one another through whatever comes.
On the day he passed his return-to-work, his phone buzzed as he was leaving the department. A Bible verse. The same verse he and his wife have carried together: ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.’
When asked about whether the crash changed how he faces risk, Rhett paused and gave a response that wasn’t redirecting the question, but rather explained his response to fear, and his ability to handle crisis with such calm.
What the crash did, more than anything, was deepen his faith.
His youngest daughter has had the hardest time adjusting to dad going back to work. After nearly a year of having him home every day, the shift back to shift work has been its own adjustment.
“We kind of joke about it,” he said, while proudly displaying the stickers that him and his daughters decorated one of his prosthetics with, “Dad was always invincible. And then he wasn’t. And now he is again, but differently.”
His wife has been, in his words, the reason all of this was possible. She was there when he entered the academy, there through every shift, and there in the hospital room when his world had to be rebuilt from the ground up.
“She was absolutely the only reason I’m an irresponsible child of an adult who made it through this,” he said, laughing. “She’s been my saving grace.”
And to Rhett, strength is no longer just physical.
“Mental health has always been a dear passion to me,” said Avant, who serves on a peer support team. “You’ve got to have the mental strength, the spiritual strength.”
“It’s not just muscular strength… it really opened up my idea of who I am, what I can do, and where my beliefs will take me.”
Paying It Forward
Rhett is on the peer support team at Merced Fire. Mental health advocacy has always mattered to him. What the crash gave him, beyond everything else, is perspective that cannot be faked or borrowed.
He has already been approached by three people who reached out needing to talk, two of them firefighters who went through similar injuries. One came through a crew that contacted him directly: ‘One of our firefighters just went through exactly what you went through. He’s in a rough spot. Will you talk to him?’ The answer, of course, was yes.
He is also in a firefighter amputee support group that connected him with a firefighter in Florida who was at an earlier stage of the same recovery journey. Rhett now relays his own failures and solutions, not just the wins.
“If I can grease the entry to this kind of life as much as I can, then I will. If I can help a brother get back to the job because I had help, I’m going to do it.”
When asked what he wants someone who is struggling, either physically, mentally, spiritually, to take from his story, he didn’t hesitate.
“They’re not alone. There’s always support out there. If you want it bad enough, there is nothing you can’t do. There isn’t an obstacle that you can’t overcome with God and the willpower.”
The Message
Rhett didn’t survive Good Friday 2025 because he got lucky, though faith played a role he’ll freely acknowledge. He survived it because of ten years of training, a wife who held everything together, a fire department that never flinched, a community that never looked away, and a conviction in his chest that there was simply no other option than forward.
Rhett doesn’t tell the story like a victim of circumstance. He tells it like a man who took the hit, studied it, and grew from it. He tells the story with a slight smile that says he is steady, composed and unshaken. There is no bitterness. No dwelling on what could have been. There are no “what ifs,” no “should haves,” no bargaining with fate. It happened. He faced it. And he moved forward.
If life deals in cards, Rhett Avant plays with the calm confidence of someone who understands the table. A bad draw doesn’t rattle him, and a sudden turn doesn’t make him flinch. He leans back, reads the room, and enjoys the game.
The river may change the hand, but it never changes the player.
“Strength over adversity,” he said. “You get handed a bad deck of cards. It’s not the end. It absolutely isn’t the end.”
Acknowledgments
This story would not exist without the openness and courage of Rhett Avant, who gave his time and his truth freely in the hope that it might help someone else. Our deepest thanks to the entire network that made his journey possible.
The Amp Group (@theampgroupinc) — a Modesto-based gym built specifically for amputees and people with disabilities, they gave Rhett the space to relearn his body and redefine his limits.
The Heather Abbott Foundation (@heatherabbottfoundation) — founded by a survivor of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, they provided the grant that put a running blade in his hands and possibility back in his stride.
The prosthetics community, including the teams behind Fillauer (@fillauer), Ottobock (@ottobock), Limber Prosthetics (@limberprosthetics), Levitate Sport (@levitate.sport), and the broader network known through the tag #protostheics, represent the engineering innovation that is quietly changing what it means to live with limb loss.
The City of Merced (@cityofmerced) and Merced Fire Department (@mercedfiredept) showed up, in hospital rooms, on doorsteps, at tones, and at the back of the apparatus bay. And @firefighermiguel, part of Rhett’s extended fire family.
To Rhett himself: @avantrhett — thank you for not having “no” in your heart. Merced is stronger for it.
