Health & Fitness
Tricycle 'Just the Ticket' for Disabled Physician
Local resident and holistic health physician Demetrius Moutsiakis rediscovers his love of cycling. We helped set up the tricycle and took it out for a spin.
My good friend and Stony Brook-trained physician Demetrius Moutsiakis (he prefers to be known as "Dr. D.") invited me over to his place in Lake Grove over the weekend to help him put the finishing touches on most recent purchase - an adult tricycle from Sun Bicycles.
It was special ordered and assembled by in East Setauket. Given its size, they also arranged for the trike to be delivered to his place by being put on a 'hitch' on the back of a pick-up. The tricycle came with a low cruiser style seat, so we had the swap out the seat stem and give Demetri a more svelt seat to carry his 150 pounds. As is sometimes the case for folks with mobility disabilities, Demetri is physically strong but needs three wheels in order to maintain his balance. With these few modifications, Sun's adult trike fit the bill nicely.
It is amazing to see how an new bike can contribute to an individual's sense of self. Demetri was born and raised in San Jose, CA. His parents settled in Lindenhurst, NY when Demetri was ten, a community in southwestern Suffolk County in the town of Babylon, and he has always enjoyed outdoor activities. When he moved to the Comsewogue/Port Jefferson Station area in the 1980s to attend undergraduate classes at Stony Brook University and eventually med school, he would typically cycle to his classes - on roads that I know very well from my own local cycling adventures.
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For the past twenty years, Demetri's walking has been much more labored. His lumbering gate and slurred speech are amongst the long-term effects of a traumatic brain injury that Dr. D. aquired as the result of a head-on bicycle-to-bicycle collision in a Nassau county park at the beginning of his third year of medical school. Demetrius' recovery from the accident would take many years (and are the subject of his memoirs).
Demetri is board certified in preventive medicine and currently practices his chosen profession as part of a holistic health practive in Farmingville, New York. He moved out to Lake Grove to be closer to his place of work (he drives to work) and has taken the time to resuscitate his love of cycling. Demetri tells me that he owned a tricycle while living in Buffalo for his preventive medicine residency and found that it helped him to keep in shape. He hopes that the new trike will do the same thing.
