March 07--Cardinal Francis George will be released Saturday from Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood after a battery of tests since doctors stopped treating his cancer more than a month ago, a spokeswoman said.
George, who retired as archbishop in November, was admitted Sunday. He will be released Saturday and return home to the Cardinal's residence, said Susan Burritt, a spokeswoman for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago.
The archdiocese released no formal statement and did not include any details on what the tests found. He was admitted "for several days of tests to evaluate his condition," according to a statement from the archdiocese earlier this week.
In December, the archdiocese announced that the 78-year-old cardinal had been dropped from a clinical trial group that was being given an antibody drug after scans showed it had not contained or reduced his cancer, according to the archdiocese.
George was initially diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2006. At that time, Dr. Gary Steinberg, director of urologic oncology at the University of Chicago Medical Center, was optimistic that the cardinal could overcome the disease. But Tuesday, Steinberg was less optimistic.
In August 2012, George learned that the disease had returned to his kidney and liver, in the form of urothelial cancer.
The cancer was in remission for more than a year when George revealed last March that the disease "is beginning to show signs of new activity."
"This is a difficult form of the disease," the cardinal wrote at the time. "And it will most probably eventually be the cause of my death."
The form of cancer that struck George in 2006, called carcinoma in situ, was relatively unusual, accounting for about 10 percent of bladder cancer cases. The tumor was considered superficial -- a flat growth limited to the wall of the bladder. But urothelial cancer cells can be aggressive, Steinberg said.
Rather than manifesting through the growth of a tumor, urothelial cancer cells infiltrate soft tissue around the lungs, liver and bone, often causing intense pain. George has been receiving palliative care in recent months.
"It's a dreadful, dreadful disease," Steinberg said, adding that the typical prognosis at this stage of the disease without treatment is two to four months.
