A Milwaukee doctor working in addition medicine is speaking out after losing his wife to a fatal overdose.
Dr. Neville Duncan is opening up about his loss because he never knew his wife was an addict.
Jennifer Duncan died as a result of an accidental overdose of fentanyl and cocaine.
“The irony of it is, I’m in addiction medicine,” said Dr. Duncan of the First Step Community Recovery Center in Milwaukee.
“Why didn’t she come to me?, he said of wife, who was 33 at the time of her death in May 2018.
“I see the devastation it has caused in families,” he added.
“Never knew that she was using,” said Dr. Duncan.
“I got a call from her mother that, ‘The EMS is working on her, but they think that she’s dead,’” Duncan explained. “Got to where she was, only to find her sprawled on the kitchen floor. EMS finished trying to revive her and they said, ‘Sorry, but too late.’”
When Dr. Duncan learned of his wife’s accidental overdose… “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “Everything started to slow down. I slipped her ring off her finger and I said to her, ‘Jennifer, why?’”
He described the mother of four as having “a bubbly personality.”
“She was the life of the party,” he said. “She was trying to help everybody else but her own.”
Dr. Duncan said after the death of his wife he “felt the need to help more.”
“It’s much more meaningful for me now, here at First Step, in taking care of those who lost their way because of her sacrifice,” he said.
“What cocaine, heroin, all of these things do, one, is to give them life as a lie. The truth is hard,” Dr. Duncan added.
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