Tully, N.Y. -- As Rob Rosolanko prepared to walk up to the stage and speak in front of 600 people in the Onondaga County Civic Center last month, he remembered the last time he was in front of a crowd: He threw out the first pitch at a Rangers/Yankees game in Dallas more than a decade ago. And he was high.

Rosolanko, 46, spent two years shooting heroin into his veins. At the same time, he held down an $80,000-a-year job as a marketing executive at Home Depot. He got married. He was getting his MBA.

While he was working, he'd slip into the bathroom and inject heroin. He mainlined heroin six or seven times a week. The rest of the time, he was either snorting heroin or taking prescription painkillers. His drug abuse began with OxyContin, but the pills became too expensive. Rosolanko said at the end he was taking as many as 45 pills a day. And that didn't get him high; it just kept him from slipping into withdrawal.

That day last month, Rosolanko told the story of how his addiction to heroin and painkillers tore his life apart and how he found his way out. It was part of a forum put together by the Onondaga County Health Department to call attention to an epidemic of heroin and opiate use.

In 2010, there was a single death from heroin and opiate overdoses. By 2015, there were 57. That number is up 31 percent from 2014, and that could increase as there are still some deaths whose causes haven't been determined. The number of people who died from heroin use, alone, was 34. Nearly all of those who died were white and there were twice as many men than women. The number of drug-addicted babies has also surged in Onondaga County: in 2015, there were 56, more than double the 2014 number.

But many people still believe heroin addiction is someone else's problem: "They're junkies. Living under a bridge. People who don't look like me," Rosolanko said. But heroin's tentacles reach into corporate offices and suburban high schools, pulling in people no one expects. It is often the desperate end of a path that begins with prescription painkillers.

This is where Rob Rosolanko's journey began: In a hospital bed, writhing in pain from pancreatitis. He had four bouts of the painful illness in his 20s. He was given opiates to deal with the pain. Rosolanko said he was a heavy drinker then and thinks that's what caused the pancreatitis.

He left with a prescription for pain pills. He popped some while sitting on his couch, not trying to get high, but trying to get rid of the pain. "All of the sudden, I felt fantastic... The weather is beautiful, I love everything," Rosolanko said.

He didn't start abusing the pills then. It wasn't until a few years later, in his early 30s, when he moved to Dallas and his job got increasingly stressful.

Rosolanko remembered the pills made him feel euphoric and began "doctor shopping" to get more, making up ailments. "I made up a stupid story: I was in a surfing accident," Rosolanko said. "And I was off." When doctor shopping got too tricky, he began buying the pills online.

By that point, he was spending hundreds of dollars a week on his addiction. That's when a friend at work suggested heroin. At first, he only snorted it. But the dealer told him to inject it. The high would be better and last longer.

So he tried it. Rosolanko remembers sitting in his car in a parking lot in downtown Dallas, in daylight, and putting the needle into his vein. He could see the grassy knoll where conspiracy theorists say a mystery shooter stood and fired at President John F. Kennedy.

"The best way I can describe it is if you're having sex and you have an orgasm - right at that peak - take that moment and stretch it out for five minutes," Rosolanko said. "It goes straight to your brain."

"And I thought, 'I want to feel this all the time,'" Rosolanko recalled. But that's one of the evil tricks heroin plays on the brain: you never feel that first high again. The more you use, the more you need, the harder any high is to reach. And the harder it is to keep withdrawal away.

Heroin withdrawal feels like the flu, only worse. And at the very worst, it feels like there are bugs inside your body. You itch from the inside out, Rosolanko said.

So Rosolanko chased the high harder and harder. And he did the things addicts, do, he said. He began making fake marketing plans for the store grand openings he did at Home Depot. He'd say he needed $10,000 worth of gift cards, but only use $8,000. He'd sell the rest on eBay. He stole $270,000 this way.

Rosolanko got caught. He was planning to go see his family in New Jersey when he received a phone call from his secretary. Is there any reason Home Depot corporate security is asking questions about you, she asked him.

Rosolanko knew he was done. He finished packing and went to the airport. He shot up heroin for the last time in the parking lot at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport Feb. 27, 2004.

And he went home. He told his family. It was hardest, he said, to tell his mother. He called her from his brother's house. "She found me, curled up in the fetal position in the corner of the bathroom with a blanket over my head," Rosolanko said. It wasn't withdrawal yet. It was shame and fear, he said.

From there, Rosolanko, then 35, went to rehab, got a lawyer and pleaded guilty to wire fraud. He served 16 months in federal prison and agreed to pay back everything he stole.

That was 11 years ago. He said he hasn't used since.

Getting caught saved his life, Rosolanko said. And it led him to the love that would make the second chapter, the one that comes after drugs, easier.

Rosolanko went to live with his brother in Binghamton while he was waiting to be sentenced. He went on a few dates with a woman. (He and his wife were divorced by this point.) "And I thought, 'I have no business doing this,'"Rosolanko recalled. He knew he'd soon be in a cell for a long time.

So he told her about everything: the drugs, needles, embezzlement and prison. She stayed, anyway.

Trina Rosolanko said her five brothers weren't too happy about her dating a drug addict who was in prison. But Rosolanko, who grew up in Castle Creek, a small town outside of Binghamton, said she just knew it would all end well.

"He just had a passion about making his life better," she said.

The two were married in 2007, shortly after Rob Rosolanko finished his prison term. They have been paying off his crime, like a mortgage, every month. Rosolanko says he's paying back the last $40,000 of the more than $200,000 that he stole.

Rosolanko wanted to help people like him. He now works at Tully Hill, in Tully, as a substance abuse counselor. The path out for him was as much about realizing he needed better tools to deal with life than it was about overcoming the drugs, he said.

"So if I learn how to deal with life and myself, I'll never feel the need to use a drug," Rosolanko said, sitting in his office at Tully Hill. "That was the key. Accepting that."

But he knows he's never cured. Rosolanko goes to 12-step meetings weekly when things are good. When they're rough, he goes a few times a week.

Around him, he has the constant reminder of how strong addiction's grip can squeeze. Obituaries of people who pass through recovery but don't beat their demons get put on the table in the conference room at Tully Hill. And then there are his friends he's met through his own recovery who haven't made it. One died in December.

Rosolanko said he doesn't miss getting high because now the memory of that euphoric feeling is mixed in with the hell and shame of withdrawal and prison. Every day when he leaves his house, he has his federal inmate ID in his pocket. It is a constant reminder of heroin's painful power.

Now, Rosolanko is quietly astounded that he has a house, a wife and a job. He stops to listen to the wind and hear kids laugh. It's not rainbows every day, but it's good, he said.

The thing that gets him closest to high now? "Helping other people... that good feeling."

Marnie Eisenstadt writes about life and culture in Central New York. Contact her anytime: email | twitter | 315-470-2246.