http://nypost.com/news/worldnews/35032.htmCANCER-RIDDEN GEORGE HARRISON NEAR DEATH: PAL
By DOMINIC MOHAN and DAN KADISON
November 25, 2001 -- Former Beatle George Harrison reportedly is clinging to life - with possibly just a week left to live - after failing to respond to a new cancer treatment.
"It's only a matter of days," a family friend told Sunday People. "Everything possible has been done to try to save him . . . yet he is fading fast."
Harrison, 58, left Staten Island University Hospital last week after experimental stereotactic radiosurgery, a procedure that delivers high beams of radioactivity to a cancer site, failed to arrest his brain tumor.
But the musician isn't giving up, the paper noted.
Instead of retiring peacefully to his Hawaiian estate, Harrison checked himself into UCLA Medical Center, choosing to battle the inoperable malignancy with chemotherapy.
"He is very weak and the prognosis is dire," a source within the hospital said. "But there is still real determination to try to save his life."
Meanwhile, Paul McCartney and the other surviving Beatle, Ringo Starr, had an emotional reunion with Harrison last week at his Staten Island hospital bedside.
McCartney, 59, was in New York to promote his latest single, while Starr, 61, was in the country to visit his daughter, Lee Starkey, undergoing treatment in Boston for her second brain tumor in six years.
Also last week, McCartney was interviewed in the music magazine Q, in which he confessed he was addicted to cocaine and only his late wife Linda's love saved him from destroying his life.
McCartney said Linda, who died in 1998 after a three-year battle with cancer, helped convince him that cocaine was "uncool" after he went on a terrifying, yearlong binge.
"Linda would say, ‘Are you sure you want to do that tonight?' and I'd go, ‘Oh, is there an alternative?'
"She reminded me there was this real life out there that I liked a lot."With Post Wire Services
