For the first time since Shannen's passing, her world renowned Oncologist Dr. Lawrence Piro opens up about losing his beloved friend and patient.He reveals how he cared for her during the final days of her battle with cancer, and speaks about the decision that could have changed her course.
This is let's be clear with Shannon, Drney a little Let's be clear family. This is doctor Lawrence Pirou.
I'm the president CEO of the Angelus Clinic and Research Institute, an oncologist, and most of you listening to this know me because I was Shannon's doctor and Shannon's friend. And this is really the first time I've talked about Shannon since she passed away. I wasn't even sure I wanted to do that. It's been hard to talk about her, even amongst family and friends. Oh, because you know, she was bigger than life. She was so big and so present, and when she was in your life, she was, you know, hugely in your life. And so it actually doesn't seem like she's gone. It seems like she's on location doing a film or series somewhere and she's working super long hours, and so we're not really talking very much. And that kind of makes the processing of all of it, you know, a little bit more more difficult, because there's still the idea that, you know, when that gig is done, she'll be back and we'll be having dinners and long conversations and talking and about all the things and doing all the things that we always did. And so when I was thinking about whether I wanted to do this, and I sat down with Rosa, we had a chat. I see Rose all the time. I take care of Rose as well, and I know all of you are concerned about her too. So Rosa's doing fine. She's she lives in Shannon's house, and she's taking care of the dogs and doing all the things that she did before, and she's you know, she's grieving.
It's a long process.
I mean, you know, Shannon started acting on sets at ten, and Rosa was with her all the time because she didn't want to trust her to any other kind of you know, on set keeper. So Shannon and Rosa have been obviously together all their lives, but they've been joined at the hip, and in the sense of when Shannon became kind of a professional adult at ten, if you were not certainly not an adult, but you know what I mean, a working person with her own opinions and things.
They've been joined at the hip from then forward.
And Shannon and Rosa with Shannon for so much of everything that Shannon did, you know, if she went places, if she did things, all of that sort of thing, they were together. So you can imagine that just the you know, the the sheer emptiness of Shannon now being there, you know, is certainly hard for her.
And then her mother and you know, all of that, but.
She's actually processing it very well, very naturally and normally though difficult.
It's difficult, but she's doing well.
And she she you know, she's so dedicated to Shannon's fans and to their you know, memory of Shannon, and they're keeping Shannon's memories alive and their loyalty to Shannon. And so I should I should express that to you, you know, on her behalf. She wanted me to to express that because it's very meaningful to her, and it's a great sense of.
It's a great sense of sort of peacefulness and recognition. Really.
I mean, it's like when you lose someone, to know that they're you know, loved and recognized by so many people.
It's a great consolation, That's what I should say.
It's a great consolation and and she feels that, and so I passed that along to all of you. You know, people have asked me a lot, not just fans from Afar, but also people who saw Shannon with me, you know, socially at places you know, a few weeks before she died, and she looked so great when we were out to dinner and did not.
Look sick and all of that.
So when news of her death came, you know, was particularly shocking. People knew she had a long journey with cancer, but nobody was really expecting that she was going to pass away at that time.
And that is due to several reasons.
One is that, you know, Shannon, it's incredibly healthy and great at putting herself together, and she looked great even no matter how sick she was.
She really really looked great. You know, there were no limitations of her movements or anything like that, so there were really no no visible evidence to others who didn't know, you know, how much the disease had progressed, that it had progressed that much, and you know what, she didn't want anybody to know.
She absolutely didn't really want anybody to know. And they knew that she had stage four cancer, but she didn't want anyone to know exactly where it was at.
Because she wasn't looking for you know, sympathy.
She was fighting every day, you know, fully forward and she wanted to look good and look active and live her full on life and things just you know, hit a turning point and happened very quickly.
You know.
It was probably that she was so well compensated for so long despite the condition of things, that after it hit a certain critical point, then it couldn't be compensated anymore. And and so then things went you know, relatively quickly.
And but but.
The job at that point was for her to be very, very comfortable and and and so she was.
I think that.
Sometimes people want under like, how could it have turned to stage or they don't really understand that that particular process of what happened. And you know, she did very well after her initial therapy and you know, did you very aggressive treatment on her, and she was in a great remission. And then on you know, routine follow up, it turned up. And people have asked, well, wouldn't it turn up on skins and things. Yes, that's exactly what happened. It turned up on routine follow up. She's completely having no symptoms or anything, and it turned up, you know, just unexpectedly, and and it was not there was not very much there, but it had spread in a way that it was stage four And so that changed our journey and changed our course of treatments and changed the balance of things, you know, for her, and so then she had to make different choices about things and what was important to her. But we, you know, marched on for a very very very long time, and she did so well, and she lived her life to the fullest. And as everyone's surprised to see how active she was and how much she was doing and then suddenly she was gone.
That shows you that she lived every day to the fullest, all way up to the very end.
And also people have asked me about clinical trials for her, and yes, we looked at many clinical trials along the way. Clinical trials are complicated because they're very rigidly structured, so you have to have certain criteria and you have to meet those criteria. And what clinical trials you know, might have been interesting to us for her particular situation were things that she couldn't fit those criteria for a variety of reasons that are you know, beyond really what we want to discuss here. But she just couldn't fit the exact clinical trial criteria for those and so we didn't ever enter into a clinical trial per se.
You know. One of the things that was so interesting and meaningful.
In the last year of her life was this podcast, you know, and so that this podcast holds a very special place in my heart because Shanna was very, very smart. You know, she she grew up being educated on set because she was acting since ten pretty much continuously. Little House on the Prairie and nine O two one zero and Charmed and all that.
But when she's going through her education and it's.
Just you know, she was, you know, voracious about information and incredibly intelligent, and so she always made her opinions based on facts and her own thought process. And you know, different people are attracted to different things than other people. You know, some people are attracted to people because they're, you know, whatever, pretty, or they're tall, or they're short, or they're athletic, or the certain color hair, or you know, what they do for a living or whatever it is. Shannon was attracted to minds, She was attracted to intelligence, and she loved a great conversation and she could carry on a great conversation. Was a great participant in conversations, and she came prepared, you know, she came prepared with you know, with facts and things. She didn't just glob onto opinions of other people or opinions that were not well founded in facts. And I think that's why she wound up up making opinions about certain things along her career that she took stands on that sometimes you know, cost her in terms of her career because she, you know, felt very strongly about those things. But if you also look at those things, they were there across the board. They're not all a group of opinions or thoughts or ideas or or or or you know, political positions or personal positions that that all, you know, are all clustered around a particular thing like being conservative or being liberal, or you know, being you know, any of these labels that you want to use for different things. None of those labels fit. It was Shannon. It was Shannon's world, and it was her opinion. And and so she, you know, she's stood up for women's wages because she felt that was right. But by the same token, she might not have stood up for something else that would be congruous with that point of view, because her analysis was different. And I love that about her because it made her unpredictable, but you know, intelligently unpredictable in the way we all should be where we are finding our voice and our message is based on facts and beliefs and truth, not based on what another group of people, UH think we should believe or or if you have a certain label on you belonging to a certain religion or party or or group or whatever association, that you have.
To now have the opinions associated with that.
We should all be making our own opinions and our own on the basis of facts and the basis of passion.
And she did that so well, that's that's something I think that's something that all of you probably recognize.
Maybe maybe maybe you did recognize that exactly literally like I'm saying it, But inherently you recog did her personality, which is why you know, you became so attracted to her, attached to her, because because that's how she was, you know, and she went hard for the things that she believed in and felt strongly about, and she shouldn't pay a lot of attention to the things that she didn't. She wasn't trying to control the world. She wasn't trying to control every topic, and she wasn't trying to control other people.
She was just trying to move the needle forward for those issues and those those causes that she felt important. And that is you know, so many long dinners and.
Long conversations that were rooted in that. And you know, if you look in today's world, I mean it's a fast moving world, and you know television, things go and snippets very quickly, and everything's about sound bites and pretty quick. In life now there are that many people that can sit down with a glass of wine and slip a glass of wine over three hours and have an intense, intelligent, fact based conversation that doesn't have fights her arguments in it. It has meaningful exchange and an openness with the possibility that you know, you might lead the conversation, you know, with a different point of view than you came with.
Because that's what makes you a winner.
Right when you're in a conversation, and if you're just trying to hammer home your point, only.
What do you win from that? Right?
But if you if you're in a conversation and you actually learn some new facts or develop some new opinions, or we can't become more more open or broad minded, or understand an issue in a way you didn't before, then you've really won. You've really left the evening with something of value. And that was always the case with Shannon. You would you would leave the evening with something value. Now I'm not saying that she didn't fight for her point. Oh boy, did she ever five her points. She's very tough for her points, and I loved it. But she always did it with facts and with playfulness and with humor. And that was great because she could laugh at herself and she could laugh at situations she didn't.
Really she really enjoyed life. I mean she really, she really grabbed it, you know. And I talked before.
About some of the dinner she would have, and like you know, dinner with Shannon at her house was Shannon in the kitchen cooking. She would always put out a beautiful on apasta as appetizers, which by the time we were done with this amazing bread and you know, fantastic cheeses and beautiful meats and vegetables and other things, it's like, we're really going to eat some more now. But then would come pizzas. She was a she was an absolute master at pizza. So then would come a course of pizzas. Usually that would be sensational and there were almost always three or four different types, so everybody had a taste to suit them, and then would come maybe apasta course.
Or maybe meat, you know, but always something delicious.
The only thing is she had served very much as fish because she didn't like fish, didn't eat fish much, but she did I remember on one occasion she did serve fish along with other things. So she knew how to cook it and she would serve it for others, but she wasn't big on eating fish herself. She also was so into food that, you know, she was up on every new restaurant when it would open, and she would, you know, she would get introduced and she would arrange a dinner there, somebody's birthday dinner or just a general dinner, and we would try all the dishes, kind of all to divide and conquer order different kinds of dishes and people could taste them. And she was very definitive about that as well. She you know, she did a very good vocabulary of cuisine and a good and a good palette, and so she could very easily get to the bottom of whether she was going back to that restaurant or not, you know, anytime soon. It was pretty you know, pretty great, pretty great. A lot of fun, such a so so very much fun. And I think that's why she didn't. She didn't want to do anything but live life to the full. She wanted to share her journey with you and tell you about about the cancer and and be able to have camaraderie with others that had it and inspire them and you know, connected them. But she didn't want that to define her life. She she wasn't a cancer person, you know. I don't think of her end that way. Yes, she had a long, long journey with him, but she wasn't She wasn't a cancer person, you know. And there are sort of two kinds of people when it comes, when it's coming towards the end.
There are people who need to.
Acknowledge coming toward the end and embrace that, you know, maybe you know, do a set of activities to a group of people, you know, things that you maybe want to do.
And other people who.
Just they know it, but they just want to live every day as fully as possible and not have that be a part of their active existence that it's getting towards the end.
And that's why.
I think, you know, you saw her full tilt and then all of a sudden you know it was done. In fact, though she did she did have a quote unquote bucket list. Though I don't think she you know, I don't think it was a kind of bucket list where she felt like, you know, I better get that list organized real, for real, fit really fast, you know, because I'm going to have that short of a time. I think it was a bigger, more long thing. But she did have a bucket list.
I don't love that.
I don't love that term myself only because I just, you know, I just believe in enjoying the fullness of something for what it is, and the idea that when it's doing it so it gets, you know, sort of crossed off the list before your time is done has a I don't know, it changes a little bit for me, but I know many people use that term. But and she used to every once in a while, mainly when she got offered the opportunity to do something that she really wanted to do. She's like, you know, one of the trips that we did, she goes, I know, you invited me because you knew that was on my bucket list, and I was like, actually, I invited you because I thought it would be fun and I thought you would have a great time, and I wasn't really thinking about your bucket list.
But you can put it that way if you want to. It was and.
Of course, like a comment like that would turn into a very jovial like discussion of bucket list and we would go back and forth and it would wind up ending with a laugh.
But it was, it was, it was.
It was really really amazing, really amazing human, amazing conversationalists, you know, amazing actress, amazing wits, so many things to to enjoy, which again, you know, it's just I'm sure, like in the middle of this, I have my ringer off right now my phone since I'm doing this podcast. But I'm telling you, if I had the ringer on, I would be relatively sure she'd be calling at some point because I'm really not at all. You know, it doesn't feel at all like she's not just you know, off working somewhere and being quiet for a minute. Because of that, you know, Shannon was very honest in her her you know, conversations in the podcast about the decisions that she made, and because she was so smart and so definitive, you know, she participated in every decision and she owned it, you know, and that's the thing, you know, she owned her decision making. She never said, you know, why did I do this or why did I do that. She made the decision, made the best decisions she could, and that was it. And then there was a go forward. There was no review later if it didn't turn out the way she.
Hoped it would.
And and we talked about, you know, the reasons that she didn't take you know, tmoxiden in the very beginning, because she had been on you know, hormone blockade for a little while for a few months and didn't really like you know, the feeling and what.
It did to her.
And so after we finished chemo and surgery and radiation, she'd want to go on that. And I brought it up with her every single time that we met in the office, said do you do you want to revisit this decision? Are you sure you know about that decision? You're shure making the right decision, we look at the data, whatever, And each time she you know, recommitted to the fact that she'd want to do that. And of course, you know when a few years later, on a scan you know, shows up some spots that are now making stage four are you, like heart sinks into your stomach about not having taken a new look. We don't know if that would have happened, even if she would have taken it. Because when you're taking quote unquote adjubant therapy, which is what that was, adjubant meaning there's no evidence of cancer and you're taking.
This pill to decrease the odds that comes back.
You know, you don't know if you would have been someone where it was destined to come back, or whether the pill would have saved you, but certainly makes you, you know, wonder and wonder about that decision.
But she, you know, she really didn't spend.
A lot of time and regret and I admire that, you know, you know, we all should live that way.
We all try to.
Yet many times we spend time focusing on why we made a certain decision and regretting it when it was an outcome we didn't expect.
And so sometimes you're looking in the rear of your mirror trying to.
Figure out how you got where you are instead of looking forward in terms of where you're going. And then mac truck hicks, you, you know, so you really got to be focusing, You got to be focusing your attention on where you're at and where you're going forward, and not trying to double back on the decisions that were made before, because it's a that's a losing game. It doesn't never makes you feel good, never makes you feel better. Often you don't ever kind of piece it back together because you don't always remember all of the the vectors that were impacting your decision of the time you were making it. So because in retrospect, some of those vectors you know, are still evident and some are not so evident, and and so you forget some of them, and then you retrace it, you can't remember them all, and you get caught up in this you know, web of you know of situation. And so I would say that, you know, it's really it's really of no.
Value to do that.
The best thing is just look at where you're at, and look at the data for where you are, make the bests as you can, and move forward and don't don't revisit it. And she certainly that was the Shannon way, and I think it was incredibly you know, healthy, every person with stage four cancer as a different course, and you know, it depends on what type of cancer and with the inspective of breast cancer. You know, there's estrogen receptor positive and negative.
There's hurt too, positive and negative, many.
Different you know, things that stratify your your your likely outcome and what the treatments are. And there's high volume disease and low volume disease, and it depends on which organ it spreads to. But there are many people with stage four disease that are able to live even decades, you know, coexisting with the disease or with it in a remission, but sort of knowing if the treatment or is stopped, maybe it would grow back. So everyone has a different course. And we certainly got a very long and good course and beat the odds in a lot of ways, and that there's some people who beat the odds even more. And then there are some people who have more difficult and shorter courses. So I don't think it's good to personalize if you have stage four cancer. I don't think it's good to personalize other people's you know, journey and outcome towards your own, because there are so many stratifying factors that weigh upon it. And when you're listening to someone else's story, you usually don't you know, you don't have those other factors, You don't have those other elements because they may not have told you in the story, they may have shared that with you, so you can't really personalize it in a way that's meaningful. And so I think, you know, it's certainly good to you know, use some people have had good courses as an inspiration. Maybe that, I mean, I think that's a nice thing. But if if someone else is having a bad course, it just it just doesn't mean that you.
Know that it's going to apply to you.
And you know, we talked a lot about quality of life, right, but your mental state, right, your mental state, your ability to feel like I'm on this planet with two feet on it, on solid territory, engaged in my life, engaged with my wife or my husband, my children, my parents, my friends, whoever they are that.
Are engaged in your world.
But that you're you're planning on the ground, you're really here, You're engaged in your life and you're enjoying your life.
This is quality of life, This is meaningful life.
If every day is just wondering what the next scan is going to bring, and you know what the next turn of events is going to be with regard to your disease. This is not quality of life because then when you look at your kids, you're, you know, your eyes missed up, wondering am I going to you know, see them graduate or see them get married or whatever, And it just takes you to a place where every day, you know, is filled with sadness, remorse and loss, you know, rather than joy, hopefulness, you know, and possibility. And so I know it's easier to say that than to do that, but we all have to live every single day embracing and fully engaged as much as you can. And I can tell you lots of situations of patients that I have who have stage four cancer and they outlive other people in their lives who were not even diagnosed with cancer at all, but during the course of their life with the stage four cancer, the other people in their life get something and pass away from it and they're still alive with stage four cancer.
So or there are car accidents or other kinds of things. So none of.
Us has any guarantee of how much time we have or what's coming. So we should all be engaged every single day and make it real and to pay deference to what we call this podcast.
What Shannon call this podcast.
Let's be clear, you know, let's be clear about the fact that we should all engage as much as we can in life because there are no guarantees of time. And although it seems like someone with stage four cancer, you know, might have a clearer path to you know, the time length they have and what's likely to happen, and often other people get surprised. So I feel I feel like people Shannon, like Shannon, you know, inspire me in my life to try to make sure I do everything that I want to do as much as I can each day, in addition to doing the things that I have to do, so that when the day is done.
I feel like, you know, I.
Lived a full day that I was engaged in and that I enjoyed, and I think we should all try to do that. I think the concept of living with cancer is something that is hard for people to understand because a lot of times cancer and historically has been something you either find it early and you cut it out and.
You're done with it, or you cut it out.
And you take some chemotherapy and maybe some radiation therapy and then you're finished with.
It, or you can't remove it.
And the treatment or the treatatment doesn't work that well, and it progresses and you die. But we're living in an era where in addition to traditional chemotherapy and radiation therapy and surgery, we now have targeted therapies, therapies that are directed toward specific molecular abnormalities and tumors for which there are drugs that interact in that molecular abnormality and change the course of how the cell grows and moves and does things. And then we also have this vast important field of immunotherapy where we're now able to manipulate the immune system to see the tumor cells and to kill them. And there are tremendous drugs that are now you know, available that are immunotherapies. And so now we have a situation where we may not be able to eradicate. Sometimes we can't eradicate the cancer altogether and have good long remissions and or cures. But in some situations of stage four where we can, we can arrest it or put into remission and then it relapses and then another remission and all of that, and sometimes it's possible to piece together all those pieces into a time frame where you're actually living out the longevity the lifetime that the universe intended for you before you've got cancer. So I think that that you don't have to think of stage four cancer as and of course it varies directly, you know immensely by cancer which type of cancer you have to think about it necessarily that it's automatically define in your longevity, but rather something you may have to live with. But if you have to live with it, that's where I say the quality of life is so important, because when you're going ten in fifteen years and you're not in remission, but you're not progressing, and you may be taking some medications and pills, some infusion once a while, but everything's okay, then you need to embrace life and live life and not let cancer define you. And that's what and that's one of the things that Shannon did so well is she didn't let cancer define her. And I say that a lot to patients when I'm meeting with them and talking to them and beginning it's say, you know, listen, especially if it's something where you know we're going to be able to do some treatments and most likely put it into a remission that will will be a cure, you know, especially young people, young people with Hodgkins ease or maybe testicular cancer some of those other things that might be curable. I say, I don't want you to become a cancer person. I want you to be a person who once had cancer, but don't be a cancer person because you know it. You know it consumes you know, it does consume your life and your identity, and it's always going to be a part of your history, but it shouldn't be a part of your you know, your identity. And a lot of times people they find incredible wealth of point of view and even sort of patina on life after having gone through it. Some people just have terrible PTSD and are just so fearful, and it really very adversely affects them, even if they're in remission or cured. But some people, if they dig deep, who've dug very deep and really looked at it, they find if I'm new meaning. And I've even had some artists in musicians who you know, really were not being that successful. They were great musicians, but they hadn't hit that kind of place where they really took off, you know, before having cancer and then and then once they had the cancer experience, I said to them, listen, I want you to know that you're going to go through this journey and it's going to give you grit, and it's going to give you, you know, gravitas, and it's going to give you life experience that is not going to feel very good, but it's going to give you something to talk about.
It's going to give you something to feel. And if you if you really process this both in your mind and your heart, but in your music, you will have the most successful career that you possibly have coming out of this. And there have been many occasions where I've been one hundred percent correct about that that they really took off during and after this therapy because they they had they now knew how.
To say stories and say things that that relate to other people. You know that they lived life. They lived life in the grittiest, most difficult way they could, and that causes you to just see it all differently and to be able to tell the story in a way that moves others. So I think that instead of thinking of this as a scary, big thing, we should think about it as just one of those things that can't happen and you embrace it and whatever the circumstances are, but you try to, you know, you try to own it, and you try to use it to build yourself forward if you can.
Not everyone has that. Not everyone has that opportunity.
Of course, it's quite a vary thing, but I think I think that's the way you have to begin looking at it and know that the universe has a wisdom about it and for whatever reason, you know, your destiny had this piece in it, and so how can you take this piece and turn it into something that makes the next phase of your life, you know, even richer and better and sort of more unexpectedly amazing. I think one of the things when you think about a person that you've known and their time comes to an end, I think it's very important to reflect what did that person leave me with? How am I changed from from her or from him or them? How I changed? Because every person that you commit real time to helps uncover pieces of you that you wouldn't have uncovered have they not entered your life. You think of your life in a way as kind of a big jigsaw puzzle. If you think part of the mission of life, maybe the most important mission of life is to turnover as many of those pieces as you can in the time that you have, so that by the time you're finished, you've revealed the clearest picture of who you uniquely were. And the more pieces you turn over, the better that picture is. And that who you are takes into account your gifts and your talents, and your commitments and your intelligence and all the unique features that each of us has. And so when people come into our lives, they help us turn over pieces of that puzzle that we wouldn't have turned over on our own because we maybe you didn't have the courage to, or we didn't really know anything about that part of who we were. We never had anyone in our life that was like that, And so they challenged you into your discomfort zone, and you, for some reason, trust them and go there and learn things about yourself. So I think that you know, with Shannon, if you knew her from Afar, you know through her work and all that.
I think, watching the way she lived her.
Life and all that, you might ask yourself, what did she leave me with? And that becomes her everlasting, you know, contribution to you. I know, for example, you know I had the great pleasure of being Pharah Fawcet's doctor. And she was an incredible woman. And as you may remember, you know, she.
Left Charlie's Angels when it was the top television show and perhaps perhaps the first television show maybe ever not sure to be a number one TV show with all women, three women as the stars. And she left the show after only about a year because she wanted other things. And most people would be afraid to do that when you get such stardom of that type, that would be afraid to leave.
But Farah Fawcett was fearless. And she wore a bracelet and ankle bracelet around her ankle had some silver beads on it, and on those beads or inscribed the word fearless in Sanskrit. And I always remember that because she was fearless and you can see that in the choices that she made throughout her career, and that was really a very defining feature of who Faarah was. And she left me with that message very strongly, to try to not live a life guided by fear, but to live a life embracing the light of what you want and to try to go for that, whether you succeed or not. And Shannon had similar, very similar qualities. Shannon was also fearless. When she believed in something, she was embraced it and stood up for it and.
Went for it.
And that was manifest if you look at at her career as well as manifest in her personal and social interactions. But it was manifest by what I'll give you is the way I describe it and something that you know, I think this is always my best way to describe what Shannon did, and that's Shannon always did Shannon. Shannon always did Shannon, and you should always do you. That's what I believe is the last thing legacy and if and that's I believe Shannon would have to say, because whether it had consequences or not, if she thought she had to do it, she did it, and she always did it, you know, true to her set of principles. So Shannon always did Shannon. And I would say that the best legacies you could have and the best way you could honor her, and maybe the best way that you can live your own life to the fullest, and in some way similar way Shannon would be to always do you. M h
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