Cory Palazzi, once an every-sport athlete, sits in a wheelchair, and speaks his truth haltingly.
It’s truth enough.
Palazzi, unsteady on his feet and slow to talk, overdosed on July 15, 2013, on Cape Cod. The hospital called his parents, Lori and Dave, to tell them that he might not live.
“We were the house with the white picket fence,” said Lori.
They lived in East Taunton. Palazzi was a member of the National Honor Society, on the honor roll from grade school on, good at everything he tried, a star athlete.
“You name the sport, he played it,” Lori said.
Palazzi injured his shoulder playing high school baseball. The doctor gave him Percocet for the pain. He liked the way it made him feel. Starting in college, his dreams of playing college ball stolen by the injury, he began to buy Percocets on campus.
He tried heroin for the first time at a friend’s house, and became addicted fast.
Cory Palazzi and his parents told their stories Saturday morning at Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School, in the auditorium, in front of an audience of children and parents. They have told the story many times before.
“Did we forget to have the drug talk?” said Dave. “No, we did not. He knew the dangers.”
Cory Palazzi came out in his wheelchair then, and spoke of his addiction.
“When I had the surgery for my shoulder, I realized I liked the feeling of being on Percocets,” he said, explaining the start of his addiction.
He went from rehab to rehab, staying clean for a while, and then falling back into heroin’s embrace.
“It was the best feeling I ever felt,” he said of heroin.
He told his audience that, because he stopped breathing for better than two minutes, his brain had been affected. Knowing there were a lot of young people in the audience, he stressed that he can’t use a computer, can’t read, can’t drive.
He was not expected to live through the overdose. He was in a coma. They asked his mother if she wanted a priest at his bedside.
He lived.
“This is why I lived,” he said of the opportunity to use himself as a living example to others.
The message doesn’t need a lot of words.
“Don’t do any drugs,” he told his audience. “You could end up like me.”
Email Marc Munroe Dion at mdion@heraldnews.com.