Timeline of George Best's Final Battle: from Hospital Admission to Tragic Demise

Take a closer look at Timeline of George Best's Final Battle: from Hospital Admission to Tragic Demise in our detailed breakdown.

To understand why George Best died, one has to examine the delicate medical compromise struck during his August 2002 operation. Surgeons at London’s King's College Hospital replaced his cirrhotic liver during a grueling ten-hour surgery. The procedure gave him an immediate reprieve from chronic liver disease, yet it introduced a perpetual clinical tightrope.

Organ recipients must take lifelong immunosuppressant medication. These pharmacological agents neutralize the body's white blood cells, tricking the immune system into accepting foreign donor tissue. The tradeoff is absolute vulnerability. A patient on high doses of immuno-modulators possesses roughly the baseline infection resistance of a late-stage autoimmune patient.

Best resumed drinking alcohol within a year of leaving the surgical ward. While medical examiners later confirmed that the donor liver itself was not the primary organ that shut down first in 2005, the behavioral relapse severely degraded his general health. His nutritional uptake plummeted. His cardiovascular resilience dropped. When a bacterial strain infiltrated his urinary tract in late September 2005, the infection met virtually zero physiological resistance.