When Aris Mougopetros was asked what he would say to Asimina Igglezou after the amputation of four fingertips from her right hand, the Greek clarinet virtuoso did not offer advice.
“I don’t know if I would say anything to her,” he told Greek media. “I think I would give her a hug to show her that I sympathise.”
Mougopetros has an uncommon understanding of what Igglezou is facing. In April 2025, a firecracker exploded in his hand during an Easter celebration in Tripotama, Achaia. Two fingers on his right hand were amputated. He also suffered an injury to his right eye. For a musician whose career is built around the clarinet, the damage to his hand carried an obvious additional consequence.
Igglezou’s injury came in very different circumstances, but with a similarly abrupt division between life before and after.
The Greek ultramarathon runner and mountaineer underwent surgery at Athens’ KAT hospital on Saturday, 19 September, four months after suffering severe frostbite during her descent from Makalu in the Himalayas. Doctors amputated the tips of four fingers on her right hand after months of treatment failed to save the damaged tissue. Her left hand has recovered.
By then, the operation was not unexpected. Igglezou had known since August that it was coming.
“After many treatments, I have managed to save three of the seven fingers that were damaged,” she said at the time. “Ultimately, the tips of four fingers will need to be amputated. My left hand has been completely saved and now the biggest battle concerns the right one.”
For readers who first encountered Igglezou on Survivor Greece in 2021, it is easy to miss the scale of the sporting career that preceded and followed television. She has spent years competing in mountain and ultra-endurance events. In 2019, she became the first Greek woman to finish the Tor des Géants, the formidable multi-day race through Italy’s Aosta Valley. By 2024, she had completed it four times.
Then came Makalu.
On 9 May 2026, Igglezou reached the 8,485-metre summit of the world’s fifth-highest mountain, becoming the first Greek woman to do so. She climbed as part of an expedition organised by 8K Expeditions, alongside Pemba Dorchee Sherpa and Pema Rinje Sherpa.
What happened afterwards has come to define the expedition almost as much as the summit.
During the descent, the weather changed quickly. Igglezou has described a violent storm that deposited a large amount of snow within about an hour, with winds reaching 100 kilometres an hour. Concerned about avalanche risk and intent on losing altitude quickly, she did not stop to change her gloves.
“I was in a hurry to get down from the high altitude, so I didn’t stop to change gloves, although I should have,” she later told Espresso. “I was telling myself, ‘It doesn’t matter, just keep going down quickly,’ because I understood there was a risk of avalanche.”
The decision left her with severe frostbite across seven fingers. She has also said that an American climber behind her on the mountain was killed in an avalanche that day, an experience that appears to have complicated any simple reading of what she might have done differently.
“She was more experienced than me,” Igglezou said. “So I believe to a large extent it was a matter of luck and not that I did something better.”
For roughly three months, treatment centred on saving as much of her hands as possible. Three of the seven affected fingers were preserved. The damage to four fingertips on the right hand could not be reversed.
That is the point at which Mougopetros enters her story.
A prominent figure in Greek traditional music, Mougopetros began playing as a child and built his career performing the clarinet at festivals, celebrations and live events around the country. His accident on Easter Monday last year threatened not only his hand but the physical mechanism of his profession.
Speaking to TLIFE following Igglezou’s surgery, he was notably reluctant to turn his own experience into a lesson for someone else.
“In these cases, words are unnecessary. Whatever I say is little,” he said. “The one who goes through it knows only himself how he goes through it and how he can overcome it. Or at least try not to think about it. It’s not something simple. You lose something from your body.”
He also understood the significance of the months between Igglezou’s injury and the eventual amputation.
“And especially when all this time has passed, because the woman has certainly suffered, it is even more difficult and harsh.”
There is also a more direct connection between them. Mougopetros revealed that Igglezou is being treated by the same surgeon who treated his hand, Emmanouil Fandridis.
“We have the same doctor, Mr Fandridis Emmanouil, he is an excellent scientist,” Mougopetros said. “I owe him the continuation of my work around music, but also my right hand, because it was normal for it to be cut off at the elbow, to put it this way, in layman’s terms.”
“Her hand is in the best of hands and with God’s help I believe she will find her way.”
It is perhaps the most reassuring thing Mougopetros could tell her, because it is specific – he is is not speaking abstractly about perseverance. He is talking about a doctor he credits with saving his hand and enabling him to continue playing music.
His own recovery has been long. Three months after the accident, he was still undergoing treatment to remove surgical pins from his injured thumb.
Igglezou is now at the beginning of a different version of that process. Following the September operation, reports said her condition was good and that she remained in hospital for postoperative monitoring and pain management.
Before the operation, she had already made clear where she hoped rehabilitation would eventually lead.
“What I keep thinking about is my return to the mountain,” she said in August. “I’m waiting for the surgery to happen, for this process to be completed, and then gradually to return to the things I love.”
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