Former addict shares cautionary story with Upper St. Clair teens
Not so long ago, Nick Shea was sitting on the other side of the room at Upper St. Clair’s Fort Couch Middle School.
As a student there, he heard various adults warn about the dangers of drugs and alcohol, and at one point probably took heed. But attitudes can change quickly.
“It started pretty much when I was sitting in the chairs you guys are sitting in,” he told a group of today’s Fort Couch students from a chair at the front of the class. “I was 14 years old when I had my first drink of alcohol.”
“I wanted to go to college. I wanted to be an engineer and build stuff and be successful and have a family.”
The 2007 Upper St. Clair High School graduate then shared what followed for him, a spiral into substance abuse that eventually led to heroin addiction. The good news is that he has been clean since Aug. 22, 2011.
The bad news is that the promise he showed as a varsity athlete and straight-A student – mostly in advanced placement classes, no less – has yet to be fulfilled.
“When I was sitting in your chairs, I didn’t say, ‘Hey, Mom and Dad, when I grow up, I want to be a drug addict.’ That wasn’t my goal in life,” he told the students. “I wanted to go to college. I wanted to be an engineer and build stuff and be successful and have a family.”
He did, in fact, attend the University of Virginia on a scholarship but eventually had to drop out. Back home, a so-called friend suggested he try a certain powdery substance, and Shea, in his intoxicated state, agreed.
“I pretty much fell in love the first time I did it,” he admitted.
Heroin promptly took over his life, to the point where he had to steal from his family to support a $100-a-day habit. He went into rehabilitation, but that ended abruptly when he left the facility in Ohio and hitchhiked his way to one of the less-savory parts of Pittsburgh.
“I ended up in, basically, this crack house, when my parents have a nice, big house in Upper St. Clair I could have gone to,” he said. “I decided, I’m going to this crack house, because that’s where I can get high.”
Shea continued, in a relatively soft, matter-of-fact tone of voice:
“So, it’s me, this 20-year-old kid from Upper St. Clair, with about five or six 30- or 40-year-old guys, with maybe five teeth combined between them, rough-looking dudes. And I’m sitting there shooting heroin in my arm, like I do every day. And there’s this little crib in the corner, and there’s this little baby lying in this crib,” with no accompanying parent evident.
“And I’m thinking to myself,” he recalled: “How did my life get to this point?”
Through the strong support of family members and friends, and through a great deal of resilience on his part – “It took a lot of work to get here” – his life has turned around, and he wants to tell his story to others who might benefit from hearing it.
“As part of my recovery and things I do to stay clean, a big component of that is giving back and trying to help out,” he said. “Mainly, it’s other fellow addicts who are struggling, but it can branch out into other areas.”
Last year, he became reacquainted with Jace Palmer, who had been an Upper St. Clair High School administrator while Shea was a student.
“He and I didn’t know each other that well, but I say that in a good way, because he was never in trouble,” Palmer, now a guidance counselor at Fort Couch, recalled. “He was an outstanding student and a good athlete. I’m the one who has to brag about him, because he’s very modest.”
For the past decade, Palmer has been working with Upper St. Clair resident Mike Burch, who lost his son to an overdose, in bringing his story to students, and he asked Shea if he’d like to do the same.
“If nothing else, I hope the kids take from Nick’s presentation to put off as long as possible the urge to experiment with alcohol and drugs,” Palmer said. “I tell them that your brain doesn’t fully develop until you’re in your 20s. And so I beg them to not be doing this stuff when they’re 13, 14, 15 years old, because they’re running a high risk of getting addicted one day.”