SAVIOR IN A SCOuRGE
S.I. nurse helps hundreds beat drug woe
MARGHERITA WAS certain that her son was going to die.
It was an October afternoon, and the Staten Island mother had been summoned to the home of her opioid-addicted 29-year-old.
She found him in the basement, ranting and raving, his eyes a scary shade of gray.
“I knew this was the last day of his life,” Margherita recalled.
Her family’s first call was to 911. The second was to a Staten Island nurse named Alicia Palermo-Reddy.
Margherita’s family had first reached out to Palermo-Reddy for advice just a few days earlier.
To Margherita’s surprise, Palermo-Reddy showed up at the emergency room and coached her on how to get the struggling young man into treatment.
Three days later, Margherita’s son, who had resisted intervention attempts for years, was on a plane to an inpatient drug program in Texas.
That was eight years ago. Margherita’s son, who has remained drug-free, now has a steady job, a wife and three children.
“She saved our lives,” Margherita said of Palermo-Reddy.
Since then, Palermo-Reddy has helped hundreds of Staten Island families like Margherita’s.
Working in her spare time and free of charge, she’s quietly become the unofficial coach, mentor and therapist to an ever-expanding network of parents and addicts touched by the city’s opioid crisis.
“She’s responsible for my son and so many others,” Margherita said. “I don’t know what her reasons are. I don’t know what drives her. That’s why I say she’s an angel.”
Growing up in Staten Island’s Huguenot neighborhood, Palermo-Reddy never imagined that she would become a one-woman addiction help line.
Palermo-Reddy was working as a dental assistant before she landed a job as a registered nurse at a Staten Island hospital 12 years ago.
The 47-year-old mother of two, now known as the “addiction angel,” was shocked by what she saw when she started picking up overtime shifts at the hospital’s detox unit.
“When I heard about heroin growing up, I thought about people in trailer parks with no teeth and black feet,” Palermo-Reddy said. “Seeing these young, beautiful kids with sores on them and heartbreaking stories was very disturbing to me.
“The more and more that I saw it, I realized there’s a big problem out here that nobody’s talking about.”
Word of her work with addicts spread quickly in the tight-knit South Shore.
Soon, Palermo-Reddy’s phone was lighting up with desperate phone calls and texts from friends and friends of friends who had relatives battling opioid addiction.
Many of the callers were in the same seemingly hopeless situation: an adult-aged son or daughter who was resisting intervention attempts.
“These are mothers saying, ‘We’re at a loss. We don’t know what to do,’ ” said Palermo-Reddy, whose three nephews suffered from addiction. “How do you not help these people?”
In those early days, PalermoReddy would guide the callers as best she could and urge them to attend local support groups.
Several parents told her they had tried meetings but were turned off by them. So Palermo-Reddy began organizing her own support groups in the backyard of her mother’s home.
Demand was so great she moved them into a local school. Then she started a “Scared Straight” program for young people that regularly draws more than 100 people.
As her reputation grew, Palermo-Reddy realized she needed to arm herself with more information. She went to a local courthouse to learn about restraining orders. She talked with cops to understand the circumstances under which they will remove someone from a home. She went to detox centers to find out about admission policies and insurance issues.
Along the way, she honed her own tough-love approach.
Palermo-Reddy believes family members often enable the addict’s drug use by setting red lines and then failing to act on them.
“An addict doesn’t want to be an addict. He’s allowed to be an addict,” Palermo-Reddy said. “I don’t want you to bury your kid, so I’m going to tell you like it is. With this disease, you don’t have time to waste.”
Palermo-Reddy has developed a reputation for being available at all hours of the day and dropping everything to help a family in need of counseling.
One Staten Island mother recalled reaching out to Palermo-Reddy on a Friday night last year.
“My son had just called me and said he had relapsed,” said the mother. “(Palermo-Reddy) was out to dinner and still she said, ‘I’ll meet you in Staten Island. I’ll meet you at the house.’ ”
In that late-night meeting, Palermo-Reddy mapped out a plan to send the 26-year-old son to a 30day drug-treatment program in Florida. He’s now 14 months sober.
“Alicia was with us every step of the way,” the mother said.
Among the many recovering addicts Palermo-Reddy has helped is a 46-year-old former Condé Nast business director.
“If I failed, I would rather tell my parents, my girlfriend, anybody but Alicia,” said the man, who has been sober since last May. “I know how much she cares about me — and she has no reason to.”
Palermo-Reddy’s all-consuming role hasn’t always been easy on her husband, Dennis, and children, Frank, 23, and Jacquelyn, 27.
“She’s gotten better,” said Jacquelyn. “At my bridal shower, she was on the phone texting with parents. I had to tell her to put her phone away. That’s how bad it was.”
On a recent Thursday night, about 30 people gathered in the auditorium of the Our Lady Star of the Sea Church for one of Palermo-Reddy’s monthly meetings.
There was a retired firefighter whose 30-year-old son was in the throes of opioid addiction, the parents of a 23-year-old who had been sober for three months and a burly recovering addict who had been clean since March. Emotions were raw. “You get to the point where after 15, 20 years of this bulls---, you say, ‘Won’t you just die already,’ ” one father said.
Another father recalled having to threaten a doctor who kept prescribing his drug-addled son pain pills.
“I told the doctor, ‘You give him another pill, I’m going to beat you to death,’ ” the man said.
Palermo-Reddy conducted the