I’m so glad I made the jump from paratrooper to podiatry

expans how he switched life as a squaddie for foot surgery

Could you imagine your whole life changing after a conversation with a stranger? For Felix lopez, 47, a chance encounter in the rain led him to an entirely new career.

“I left school in ’89 without any qualifications,” says Felix, who grew up in Manchester but now lives in Kent with his wife Leah and their two children. “I’d always had a desire to join the armed forces, so signed up for the parachute regiment.”

Felix served four years, including deployments in Belfast and training with the SAS, before he began to wonder if there was something else for him.

“Some of my friends were only just leaving university, so I began thinking that if they could start out then, why couldn’t I?”

He knew it was time for a change, but wasn’t sure what he might do. “My squadron was based in Aldershot at the time,” he recalls. “I’d just finished a session at the barracks gym but it was pouring down, so I was sheltering until the rain stopped and got chatting to a US serviceman who was waiting too.”

When Felix mentioned he was leaving the paras, his new acquaintance asked about his plans. “I said that some of my friends were doing physiotherapy and that I had always been interested in how things move.

“He said, ‘you want to be a podiatrist’. I know it sounds ridiculous, because I’d never even heard of podiatry, but I decided to look into it.”

Felix discovered podiatrists are healthcare professionals who treat problems of the feet and lower limbs. “I asked one of my physio friends about it and he told me that Norman Whiteside, the ex-manchester United player, was now a podiatrist. I thought it sounded interesting, so got a prospectus.

“It talked about the specialisms. I saw podiatric surgeon and thought I might as well aim for the top!”

But when he left the army just a few weeks later, Felix realised he needed to go back to college. “So I signed up for an adult learning access course, along with AS Level biology. From there I got into university, finishing my podiatry degree in 2001.”

While working as a podiatrist in Manchester for NHS Trafford, he took postgraduate courses in the surgical management of foot and ankle problems. “I finally completed my studies in 2016,” says Felix, who is now a consultant podiatric surgeon at the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital in Kent. “It was an awful lot of work, but it’s incremental – and I love being part of the NHS, so it was worth it.

“There’s so much variety: every day is different. It’s great to know you’re helping people.”