What The Final Year Of George Harrison’s Life Was Really Like

On November 9, 2001, ABC News reported that George Harrison would be receiving another round of radiation treatment for his brain tumor, this time at Staten Island University Hospital in New York. The procedure, known as fractionated radiation therapy, had been around for about four decades at that time and was designed in such a way that the radiation would only target the growth, thus avoiding healthy sections of brain tissue whenever possible. However, the outlet stressed that the treatment was likely too little, too late for Harrison, as his lung cancer was still spreading. The brain tumor was, in fact, one that had metastasized from his cancerous lung. 

While Harrison’s physician, Dr. Gil Lederman, said that the procedure had a 90% success rate, Dr. Stephen Tatter, co-director of the Wake Forest University Gamma Knife Center, clarified that the figure didn’t exactly mean the musician had a very good chance of surviving. “A lot of those things end up being a function of how long the person lives,” he explained. “If you die before your brain tumor comes back that’s considered success, but it’s not really success, obviously. If you look at actuarially adjusted success rates they’re significantly lower; about 60 percent after one year.”

Another doctor, Robert Fenstermaker of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, offered his own grim prognosis, telling ABC News that it’s usually the main form of cancer that ends up killing the patient, as opposed to the metastatic brain tumor.