Between Jobs, Between Lives: Workplace Injury, Career Change and Reinvention

20 July 2025 remains fixed in my memory not simply as the day I injured my back, but as a moment that revealed something about the time in which it occurred. A quiet Sunday, an ordinary box, and a misjudged lift, nothing dramatic, nothing cinematic. Yet the sharp, sickening explosion in my spine marked the beginning of an experience that reshaped my life and forced me to confront the systems, assumptions, and expectations that had surrounded me for years.

The injury itself was straightforward enough, a slipped disc. The consequences were not. Within hours I could barely walk. Within days I was effectively confined to home, navigating sciatic pain so severe that sleep became a negotiation rather than a rest. I spent nights kneeling on the floor, leaning against a chair, improvising positions that allowed the pain to ebb just enough to endure. It was a private struggle, but one shaped by the realities of contemporary healthcare and the limits of ordinary life.

A GP Appointment That Wasn’t

When I reached the point where I needed medical help, I did what people in Britain have done for generations: I went to my GP. Or rather, I tried to. Instead of seeing a doctor, I was seen by a paramedic, pleasant and well meaning, but clearly working with limited information. He did what he could within the constraints of the system, offering strong painkillers and general guidance, but no scan, no detailed examination, and no clear prognosis. It was a diagnosis delivered without investigation, based more on probability than certainty.

The walk from the surgery to the chemist, a distance that should have taken five minutes, became its own quiet record of incapacity. It took me nearly half an hour. I moved slowly, stopping every few steps as the nerve pain surged down my leg. People passed by, living their ordinary lives, while I inched along the pavement like someone decades older. That walk remains one of the clearest memories of the entire period, a physical demonstration of how profoundly the injury had altered my world.

A Year of Narrow Living

The next month was a study in limitation. Ordinary movement became difficult, sleep fractured into short, uncomfortable intervals. By late August I believed I was improving. I wasn’t. A minor relapse in October, then a severe one in December, left me incapacitated again, this time with a crutch. The December relapse was particularly significant: the disc had protruded onto a nerve, causing severe sciatica and making walking a slow, painful process.

By early 2026, mobility had become a daily challenge rather than a given. These issues persisted until mid‑2026, almost a full year after the initial injury. Every movement had to be negotiated, every journey planned, every day measured against what the body could tolerate.

Predictions and Misjudgements

The private advice I received early on was uniformly pessimistic. I was told that my working life was effectively finished as I had known it. I was warned that I would never again be capable of physical work, that I would carry a permanent weakness, and that I faced a future of recurring relapses unless I made drastic changes. These predictions were delivered with confidence and came at financial cost. In hindsight, they reflected the uncertainty of the situation rather than any reliable assessment of my future.

Some guidance was merely ineffective. One particularly poor set of advice sent me down a path that carried the risk of reputational damage and even litigation. It was a revealing moment, a reminder that private expertise varies widely in quality, and that the burden of discernment often falls heavily on the injured individual.

Ultimately, I had to learn about the injury for myself. What followed was a period of intensive self‑study: anatomy, disc degeneration, nerve compression, the mechanics of movement. I became, out of necessity, a historian of my own body. The information available publicly was fragmented and often simplified, but slowly I built a clearer understanding of what had happened.

The MRI and Its Clarity

It was only in early 2026 that I was finally granted an MRI scan. The slipped disc was confirmed, and the scan also showed disc desiccation, a degenerative change involving loss of water content within the disc. For the first time, there was an anatomical explanation to accompany months of pain and uncertainty. It did not resolve the injury, but it clarified it, giving shape to what had previously been guesswork.

And yet, some of the most categorical predictions proved wrong.

Reconstruction and Adaptation

Through careful management, knowing my own limits, and learning when to stop, I have regained a fairly independent life. The way I move has changed. Twisting or turning with weight is now all but impossible, and my body sends immediate reminders if I forget. But moving straight with weight, controlled, deliberate, aligned, has become almost normalised. The injury did not end my working life; it reshaped it.

By mid‑2026, the mobility issues that had dominated my life for nearly a year began to ease. I am now proud to say that I am regaining my ability to enjoy walks and distance again, something that once felt entirely out of reach.

The injury also reshaped my lifestyle. Alcohol consumption has been removed entirely. My diet has changed radically. I have lost a significant amount of weight. These changes were not cosmetic but structural, a recalibration of how I live, move, and maintain myself.

Work, Memory, and the Unexpected Gift of Time

What the injury took away in freedom, it gave back in time: uninterrupted, unhurried time. That space allowed me to complete long‑gestating historical work: Voices from the Uplands, From Fields to Railways, Faith, Service and Respectability. These were not quick books. Their foundations had been laid years earlier, scattered across drafts and notes. The injury simply removed the distractions that had kept them unfinished.

My initial era of publications had been in the mid‑2010s, works I remain proud of and which made my name as a historian. But more records had emerged since that time, and over the years I had accumulated new notes, updated information, and privately revised material. My professional third sector career had left me with limited time, so I had accumulated a mass of scattered notes and research over almost a decade. My computer was littered with manuscripts in various stages of completion.

The enforced free time gave me the opportunity to return to them, updating earlier publications, finishing long‑delayed manuscripts, and bringing new works into the open.

The lesson of my ancestor George Roberts Shorto has always acted as a quiet reminder. He was highly regarded for his historical knowledge, but he never recorded it, and when he died all of that knowledge was lost. I have carried that ghost for years, the warning of what happens when memory is allowed to evaporate. I no longer carry it. My work on the Montgomeryshire uplands, my Crewe railways ancestry, and Victorian Exeter is now completed. There may yet be fragments that emerge in time, but nothing substantial remains unfinished.

Completion became the quiet theme of the period. The injury forced me to finish what had been waiting, to bring order to years of accumulated research, and to ensure that nothing of value remained unrecorded.

Midlife Change, Not Midlife Crisis

By August 2026, I reached a conclusion that had been forming quietly for months. My day‑to‑day operational third sector career, a career that had included extraordinary highs, was clearly over.

I had left the third sector in early 2024 when my time as a Salvation Army Store Manager had naturally come to an end. The assumption, mine and others’, had always been that I would return when the right opportunity presented itself. For a long time I believed I was simply between jobs. The injury made me realise I was between lives.

Operational third sector work had always been physically demanding. Moving heavy bulk furniture, negotiating awkward buildings, navigating tight spaces, and performing the kind of labour that wears the body down over time. It was work I am no longer able to do.

Yet the injury did more than end a chapter. It created space for reflection.

By then, both the third sector and my place within it had changed significantly. My career highs had been between 2013 and 2017 when I held senior roles in both the third and commercial sectors. That period was marked by influence, responsibility, and a sense of momentum. But eras change, and people change with them.

I have now evolved into something entirely different: a private adviser offering guidance and insight to a new generation of leaders in both the third and commercial sectors. It is quieter work, but deeper. It draws on experience rather than position, and on judgement rather than hierarchy. It is, in its own way, a continuation not of the operational chapter, but of the interpretive one.

Somebody reaching out and asking for advice on what to do about a particular situation has become interesting and meaningful. It is a different kind of responsibility, one rooted in perspective rather than authority. I can also now contribute more in the background to causes and issues that matter to me, whether that means writing to politicians and sector leaders, or quietly advising and suggesting ideas when I believe they may help. It is influence without visibility, and purpose without the demands of formal leadership.

And if I am honest, the end of my third sector career may be a blessing in disguise. No more travelling across the country to have meetings about meetings. No more extensive reports on riveting subjects like bulk waste, mattress stripping, dealing with asbestos, or vermin and pests in empty social housing. No more unpaid evenings spent wrestling with rotas, inboxes, and the endless minor staffing disputes that somehow became major managerial problems. The injury closed a door, but it also spared me from reopening one that had become increasingly exhausting and faintly absurd.

Now, I have something precious. I have freedom in my life. The freedom to read. The freedom to enjoy music. The freedom to be spontaneous and do something enjoyable with my day. I no longer have to worry about a workplace and its operational and staffing issues. That is a freedom many do not get to enjoy until it is too late.

Hardship Reinterpreted

With time, hardship changes shape. What began as misfortune became a pause, a reckoning, a return to work that mattered. It reminded me that memory does not preserve itself. Notes must be ordered. Research must be written. Lives must be given form before they slip away.

At my lowest points, and on the days when the pain was at its greatest, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux became a quiet companion. I prayed for her help and intercession, and I obtained holy water from Lourdes. These small acts of faith did not remove the pain, but they steadied me through it, offering a sense of presence and consolation when the nights were long and movement was difficult. They became part of the rhythm of endurance, a reminder that suffering is never entirely solitary.

My Calvinistic Methodist ancestors might have seen the injury as a kind of intervention, unwelcome, painful, but purposeful. Whether one believes that or not, the irony is clear. What injured the body created space for the mind. What limited me physically allowed me to recover something else entirely.

In that sense, the injury became not just a personal event, but a small historical record of its time, a window into the systems, assumptions, and realities of Britain in the mid‑2020s, seen through the body of one historian trying to walk from a GP surgery to a chemist.