How a bad hotel stay in New York led me to the best physio in Athens💪
After a shock fall in a freezing Manhattan hotel room, a long journey leads to (slow) healing and the small clinic in Pagrati that changed everything
There may come a time when a lass needs a lawyer🎶…or when a weary traveler needs a good physical therapist.
Why I needed one has a lot to do with a poor choice of hotel in the overtouristed cesspit (but with great bagels!) that is New York City.
There’s a separate story in there, but for legal reasons, I won’t name the hotel.
Oh wait a sec, I will: the INNSiDE by Meliá New York NOMAD. Avoid it.
Let’s just say that being above the age of 40 and falling off a cheapass desk chair and landing flat on your back and butt onto a hard floor in a freezing hotel room in midtown Manhattan is nowhere anyone would ever want to be.
And let’s just say that following up such an ordeal with a very long journey to Europe in part on one of the worst airlines known to man (American) doesn’t help matters much.
Makes them much worse, actually.
It’s enough to drive one — on doctor’s orders, naturally — to physical therapy.
I’ll skip the bit about the searing pain and the bleeding into my bones and the numbness in my foot and the noisy MRI not entirely drowned out by the Chappell Roan track on the headphones provided, the herniated disc for the moment. None of which, believe me, comes with an easy AI fix.
Focus rather on a nifty Greek word for a very gradual process, apokatastasis — restoration.
It’s also the name of what I do declare to be the best little physiotherapy practice in Pagrati, or possibly in the whole of Athens: Apokatastasis.
There, Ilias Tolos, Physiotherapist – Manual Therapist, MSc, Certified PNF Therapist, helps the sore and physically hurting of the metropolis to heal.
It takes time.
Patience.
Participation.
From the beginning of my personal ordeal to the latter part several weeks after, Ilias was one of the few, okay the only person who really listened and who I felt understood the severe pain I had been experiencing, from my lower back all the way down to my foot, which for several weeks I literally could not feel.
I thought about this while the Spanish hotel chain evasively apologized for my “discomfort.”
Never cared for Spain. Don’t much now, either.
Anyway, I realized, through this two-way process, that beyond my physical injury I was also emotionally traumatized. Not just by the indifference of so many “busy” people, particularly the Spanish, to suffering. When things happen that make realize just how fragile the human body is, you just recalibrate.
Between Mr. Tolos’ fluent English and indulgence for my woeful Greek, communication was never a problem as he guided me though various mobility exercises, some which had for objective to ease the severe nerve compression damage sustained during the fall.
Good communication itself, such a rarity today, is in itself a thing of therapeutic value. Anyway…
I repeated the exercises at home, then reported on my progress at the start of each half-hour session in his studio, located a couple floors above Bershka on a sunny stretch of Eftichidou Street, one of the liveliest blocks of Pagrati.
The philosophy at “Physio Apokatastasis” is encapsulated in the phrase “the best possible therapeutic outcome in the shortest possible time“. Check out some of what they do here.
I am very grateful to have found Ilias’s place. Obviously for short stays in Greece you’re not going to have much need for a physical therapy (probably) but for longer stays, you never know. Athens is full of fascinating but crumbling ruins, and in the modern parts, people are tripping and falling onto dilapidated sidewalks all the time. (The arrogant mayor of Athens seems to have other priorities, like his own political career even though the governing New Democracy administration has a firm lock in virtually every poll).
If you do need a physio lift while in Greece though, well, now you know where to go.
As for New York City? FAIL.
In fact, th reason we found ourselves in that (ahem) socialist paradise was because it’s where our non-stop flight from Athens on Delta brought us.
But we never really recommended that flight, because, well, New York.
So we do not recommend it now. Want some more reasons why? For the moment, here are a few.
