Shannen Doherty‘s oncologist Dr. Lawrence D. Piro is recalling the moments before the actress’ death.
Piro, 68, had treated the late Beverly Hills, 90210 star at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and developed a close friendship with her. He was with her when she died on Saturday, July 13, at the age of 53. In an interview with People published on Monday, July 15, Piro described the scene as she took her last breaths.
“In the last few hours, she was in a place where she was very comfortable and sleeping and transitioning, and she was surrounded by some of her very close friends,” Piro told the outlet. “The room was surrounded by a select group of friends that were giving her a lot of care and support. It was somber and sad, but beautiful and loving. The hardest thing about this was that she wasn’t ready to leave because she loved life.”
On the June 24 episode of her “Let’s Be Clear” podcast, Doherty gave a tearful update on her decision to undergo another round of chemotherapy for stage-4 breast cancer. “I’m having to go back on chemo and it’s really hard,” she said. “The idea of going through that all over again has wrecked me.”
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Yet she continued to fight her illness. “We kept going until we couldn’t go any more,” Piro said. “The last conversation that we had, she was in the process of realizing that things had taken a pretty significant turn. The conversation was about love and support and caring and still fighting through. She wanted to continue to take treatment and fight through, even though her physical condition had taken a bit of a downturn. And so we did.”
While Doherty encountered a “limited situation of options” within her final days, “still, the conversation was about, ‘What can we do within those limitations?’ as opposed to, ‘Let’s do nothing,’” the doctor explained. “That wasn’t even open for discussion, because that’s not how Shannen lived. She was an incredible warrior in everything she did.”
Doherty fought for her life amid her deteriorating marriage to Kurt Iswarienko, from whom she filed for divorce the day before her death.
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“I never got the sense that that emotional challenge was draining her ability to continue to fight on the medical side,” Piro said. “It certainly made it more challenging, but she’s such a winner that I feel like she pulled all the resources necessary to give the best fight against cancer, even though she was being very emotionally challenged. She fought so hard and she didn’t believe that it would ever be over, which kind of makes everybody around you believe that, too, because you want to believe that.”
Doherty revealed her diagnosis in 2015, and after two years of chemotherapy, confirmed she was in remission. The cancer returned in 2020 when Doherty said she was diagnosed with stage-4 breast cancer, and three years later, it had spread to her bones.
