It's 6:30 in the morning. Dr. Paul Klimo gets out of bed and walks into the kitchen. He makes mango tea, which he sips while his English muffin browns in the toaster.

His wife wanders into the kitchen a little later. They chat, discussing their much-needed home renovations that keep getting put off.

At 8 a.m., Klimo makes the brief commute from his house in West Vancouver to Lions Gate Hospital, where he runs the chemotherapy clinic.

At the hospital, Klimo grabs an espresso from the coffee counter, and at 8:30 a.m., his staff in the oncology department huddle to plan their busy day. They'll be seeing nearly 30 patients, some for consultations and some for treatment. After lunch, Klimo leaves the hospital and heads up the street to his office where he'll spend the afternoon with another round of patients. All told, he will see as many as 45 people during his day.

This is Klimo's routine. It's been this way more or less since he came to the North Shore three decades ago.

He'll trace these steps for the last time on Thursday, June 30, and then he'll retire.

• • •

"You can't do oncology part time," says Klimo, seated at his usual table next to the wine case in Gusto di Quattro. "I don't look it, but I'll be 70."

He's right; he doesn't look it, and though soft spoken and serene, Klimo seems energetic and focused. Despite his vigour, he's convinced that the time has come to let go of the "fully absorbing" challenge of attacking cancer; he's ready to "hit the delete button."

Klimo arrived at Lions Gate Hospital oncology department -- via the former Czechoslovakia, Toronto and Vancouver -- to work as a chemotherapist in the early 1980s. Back then, it was on a part-time basis and for a few years he split his time between LGH and the Vancouver Cancer Centre.

He soon fell in love with the North Shore, and by 1985 he had started treating cancer at LGH full time.

Klimo estimates he's treated more than 50,000 patients during his career on the North Shore -- about 2,000 each year. For any North Shore resident who has faced down cancer in that time, there's an 85 per cent chance Klimo advised, referred, or treated them at some point during the process. Though his career, which spanned a half century, will wrap up at the end of the month, Klimo's legacy within the community will continue for years to come. His expertise, persistence and directness touched the lives of many who fought the disease, whether they won or lost.

Klimo also leaves behind a financial legacy; over the years, grateful patients and their friends and family have donated more than a million dollars to the Lions Gate Hospital Foundation, earmarked specifically for the Klimo Fund.

• • •

In 2000, Daphne Grisdale learned that she had breast cancer. Like the thousands of others before and after her, she met Klimo soon after her diagnosis.

Daphne's son Doug was living in the United States at the time. When he heard of his mother's illness, he started making trips to North Vancouver to accompany Daphne during her appointments.

When Doug thinks back to his first encounter with Klimo, he remembers a direct and honest doctor who "didn't beat around the bush."

Despite Klimo's no-nonsense approach, "my mom loved him," Doug says. "Just loved him."

"I remember once my mom thought he was upset with her," Doug says, thinking back to one of the more difficult periods in Daphne's treatment.

Doug told his mom he didn't think Klimo could invest too much emotion into each patient; it wasn't a matter of being upset. "He's a man who deals with life and death every day," Doug says. He "wouldn't have the emotional energy for being . . . mad at somebody. It would kill him."

Klimo predicted they'd be able to beat Daphne's cancer -- temporarily. He expected that they could win her five years of good health. And he was right; Daphne's cancer retreated.

During her fifth annual checkup in 2006, they discovered it had returned.

The first time around "the chemotherapy combination was definitely hard on her," Doug says. "She ended up pretty weak and dehydrated at one point. There was a little bit of a health scare . . . because of the treatments."

After consulting with Klimo, it was decided Daphne would forgo the therapy and its harsh side effects; they elected to try radiation treatment instead.

While radiating, doctors found a second inoperable tumour inside of Daphne's lung. Klimo felt that attempting chemotherapy on the new tumour would only steal time from Daphne and her family.

Doug says at one point his mother started to question the radiation treatment she was receiving. She felt confused and wanted to keep Klimo in the loop, even though he wasn't the one overseeing it. Daphne insisted on getting Klimo's perspective whenever she could. She trusted him.

"Whenever we'd go to meet with (Klimo) -- he's a very, very busy man -- he'd make the time to see us and answer my mom's questions," Doug says.

"If he was overseeing it, she was going to get the best care," Doug says. "It was Klimo's show."

For Daphne and her family, Klimo's character shone the brightest near the end.

In February 2006, Klimo summoned Daphne, her husband, Doug and the rest of the family to his office.

"(Klimo) gave her six months to live," Doug says.

The oncologist delivered the news with poise and honesty, Doug recalls. "It was elegant . . . the grace with which he handled the situation was amazing."

"We rallied around my mom, and did everything we could to make sure her last few months were good," Doug says.

"She was an amazing woman," Doug says. "My mom died in the summer of 2006."

The passing of Daphne didn't mark the end of Doug's relationship with Klimo.

• • •

For many years, Doug and his brother-in-law, Antonio, tossed around the idea of starting a restaurant. During the first Christmas after Daphne's death, he and Antonio decided to bring the restaurant idea to life.

They found a location four blocks away from where Doug grew up, and two blocks away from where his parents had grown up (they met when they were toddlers).

Doug and Antonio teamed up with chef Rob Parrott, whose daughter had battled a brain tumour a couple of years before. All of them had been touched by cancer.

"We agreed we wanted to use the business to do what we could . . . in helping fight cancer," Doug says. They opened Mangia E Bevi in April, 2007.

The restaurant's first year went well, and they decided to plan an event for that January to raise money to fight their common foe. They put together a three-course meal, with $5 from every sale going to Children's Hospital and another $5 to Klimo's oncology fund.

The first year Doug and his partners raised $1,500. "It felt like a decent amount," Doug says. Since then, the annual event altogether has raised more than a $100,000.

Many customers knew Klimo or had been treated by him, Doug says. A lot of people left extra donations, while some left personal notes.

Donations to the Klimo fund were also flowing in from other sources.

Klimo "left a tremendous legacy here at the hospital because of the funds that he has raised," says Judy Savage, the president of the Lions Gate Hospital Foundation. She says people routinely requested that instead of flowers, donations be made in Klimo's name to the foundation. Because it started happening so often, and in such volume, the foundation decided to create a separate fund.

The money supports oncology services at LGH, bringing new resources to diagnostics, chemotherapy, and "comfort equipment" for cancer patients.

During the last four or five years the Klimo Fund collected more than a million dollars. If all the donations made over Klimo's career were tallied, "(the amount) would be far greater than that," Savage says.

The fund will continue beyond Klimo's departure, Savage says, and the foundation will continue to consult with Klimo and other oncologists in the clinic. She says patients and their families express a lot of gratitude for Klimo, and their gratitude eases the struggle that other cancer patients face.

"It makes their journey a little bit easier," Savage says.

• • •

Klimo gets a "warm feeling" when he discusses his fund and thinks back to the challenges of his medical career. He also feels good when he looks into the future, he says.

"I'm looking forward to something different that I know has been out there," Klimo says as his lunch at the bottom of Lonsdale Avenue winds down (it's his reprieve from the hospital). "I've been absorbed, secluded," he says.

After celebrating his 70th birthday -- shortly after his retirement -- he and his wife plan to get started on those home renovations. Klimo looks forward to spending more time with his two children -- a neurosurgeon and a lawyer. He also plans to travel, perhaps to New York for some Broadway theatre and other cultural attractions.

For a while, he thought about getting into local politics, but he's since decided that's a bad idea. It's another "can of worms."

When asked how he feels about his no-nonsense reputation, he struggles to find words -- an unusual moment in the conversation.

"I hope that (my style) has worked with most of my patients," Klimo says. "Sometimes it hasn't worked."

He feels success doesn't come from being liked. "You tell the truth," he says, adding that it's important to be creative and to work hard.

"If you win (beat the cancer), you feel good," he says. "If you lose the battle, you feel sad about it, but looking back you can say 'Well, you know, the fight happened; I've done my best and it just didn't work out.'"

He hopes that when patients and their families think about his treatment, they're satisfied he did everything he could.

Thinking back on his life and the war on the disease, Klimo's "major revelation" was that despite the pain, fear and confusion linked to cancer, "the vast majority of oncology patients are great warriors."

Death isn't a failure, Klimo points out. If he's done everything he can and things don't work out, at least he's gained valuable time for his patients and their friends and family, he says. "The next time you try again and try to get better."