Shannen Doherty’s Close Friend and Doctor Describes Her 'Beautiful and Loving' Final Moments (Exclusive)

"She wasn't ready to leave because she loved life," Dr. Lawrence D. Piro tells PEOPLE of the actress, who died on July 13 after living with stage 4 breast cancer

• Actress Shannen Doherty died on Saturday, July 13, after fighting stage 4 breast cancer

• The Charmed alum found a friend in her oncologist Dr. Lawrence D. Piro, and he was by her bedside when she died

• Piro calls Doherty "an incredible warrior" to PEOPLE and says "things turned much more difficult in the last couple of weeks" when it came to her health

Shannen Doherty considered her oncologist Dr. Lawrence D. Piro not only a trusted adviser during her breast cancer journey, but also a close friend.

“We both immediately got each other,” Piro, a doctor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, tells PEOPLE. “Sometimes that just happens. The vibe is right and you understand each other and you understand what the thoughts mean as if you had known each other for years before that meeting. That's what it was like for us when we first met, and it was that way all the way until the very last.”

Doherty, who died on Saturday, July 13, at age 53, previously stated that she and Piro had “a great relationship, one of mutual respect.”

“The key is to find a doctor who listens to you and appreciates your concerns,” she wrote on Instagram in September 2016. “Not every cancer patient is the same. Also, it took me a lot of meetings to find my dream team. Don't settle.”

Related: Viola Davis, Katie Couric and More Stars Pay Tribute to Shannen Doherty After Her Death: 'Fly So High'

The Charmed star first received her breast cancer diagnosis in 2015 and went into remission in 2017. The cancer returned in 2019, and Doherty revealed in 2020 that she’d been diagnosed with metastatic stage 4 cancer.

Piro, who appeared on the Jan. 1 episode of Doherty's podcast, Let's Be Clear, remembers the actress as “a very intelligent person” who “was a very active participant in her entire health journey.”

“Whenever she learned some new fact or some new idea in her medical journey, she would immediately call me or forward something to me and we would discuss it and see whether it had any relevance to her scenario and where it would fit into the scheme of things for her,” he recalls. “I was always amazed with the way in which she could separate her own emotions about being so young and being on such a difficult journey from the fact-finding part. She was so razor focused and level-headed about those things.”

Related: Shannen Doherty Shares the 'Bucket List' Trip Her Oncologist Made Happen as He Calls Her 'Fearless'

According to Piro, Doherty was “a step above positive” when it came to how she viewed her prognosis.

“In her mind, she was not wanting to consider any other alternative than ‘we were beating this and we were engaged in life,’” Piro says. “We didn't really talk about what that meant in terms of additional time for her because that just wasn't how she operated. She wanted to live every day, not as if it were her last day, but as if it were the beginning of a whole another chapter for her.”

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The actress said on the June 24 of her Let’s Be Clear with Shannen Doherty podcast that she planned to start chemotherapy again in hopes of beating her stage IV breast cancer that spread to her bones last year.

“We kept going until we couldn't go any more,” Piro says. “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.”

The doctor explains that Doherty found herself with “a limited situation of options” due to “her condition” over the last few weeks. “But still, the conversation was about, ‘What can we do within those limitations?’ as opposed to, ‘Let's do nothing,'" he says. "That wasn't even open for discussion, because that's not how Shannen lived. She was an incredible warrior in everything she did.”

In the face of declining health, the Beverly Hills, 90210 alum had also been involved in stressful divorce proceedings with her ex-husband Kurt Iswarienko, who she filed for divorce from in April 2023 after 11 years of marriage.

But, “I never got the sense that that emotional challenge was draining her ability to continue to fight on the medical side,” Piro says. “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.”

For more on Shannen Doherty, pick up this week's issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.

However, it quickly became evident that that wouldn’t be the case. “Things turned much more difficult in the last couple of weeks, and that's when it became clear that it was heading in a different direction,” Piro says. “We continued to fight while putting in more support and we just kept loving and hoping and supporting.”

Piro spent Doherty’s final moments with her and some of her love ones, including her dog Bowie.

“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,” he shares. "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.”

Related: Shannen Doherty Said She Was Going Through the 'Hardest Time' She'd 'Ever Had' Prior to Her Death from Cancer

Piro typically associates Doherty’s home with vibrant dinner parties. “She was an incredible, incredible chef,” the medical expert says. “It was very strange being in her home with her in a bed and not in the kitchen bringing out pizzas and cooking pasta. She loved cooking, she loved giving parties. She loved entertaining. What kept her going was a love for life and a desire to have more life. That was incredibly painful for her not to be able to do that.”

Piro believes Doherty’s legacy should be one of treating others with kindness.

“This tremendous love for life was inspired by a love for people and a love for being treated well,” he says. “And I think that that grew out of being in public eye from a very young age and feeling misunderstood most of her life. She would want us to live our lives as strongly as we can, committed to our convictions and to not allow others to label you or to misrepresent you and stop you from living your best life.”

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