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Maradona fulfills hardest month
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2004-05-19 15:31

Former Argentine football star Diego Armando Maradona fulfilled Tuesday the hardest month of his life hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic in Buenos Aires, after a heart and lung crisis almost killed him and led him to a complicated rehabilitation process.


Unidentified supporters of former soccer star Diego Armando Maradona wait outside the Del Parque private clinic, where the legend has been admitted, in Castelar, west Buenos Aires. A judge declared that Maradona was unfit to decide his own fate. [AFP]

A calm Argentinian afternoon on April 18 was suddenly interrupted when it was confirmed that Maradona was in intensive care in the Suizo-Argentina private clinic.

Once again a victim of his own drug addiction, the 43-year-old legend shocked his country and many others where he is also considered the best football player of all times.

The diagnosis, issued at night to disregard rumors of a cocaine overdose, revealed a hiper-tensive crisis with a dilated miocardiopathy caused by a pneumonia.

In this way Maradona became the center of press attention, who restlessly harassed him while thousands of fans created at the hospital's doors a collective mural with images and phrases to support the former star.

Many versions were released: that Diego needed a heart transplant, that a high level of cocaine had been found in a urinesample, that he needed or not an artificial respirator, that pictures had been taken while he was in the hospital's bed.

Maradona is said to want to return to the drug unit in Cuba where he has been fighting his well documented drug problem since 2000. Cuban president Fidel Castro has put a plane on standby for the 1996 World Cup winning captain.

Suffering from drug withdrawal symptoms the 43-year-old Maradona had to be placed under sedation on Tuesday "after an uncontrollable fit of temper", family sources claimed.

Among this problems and his family's attempt to preserve the privacy, he surprised the entire world when 12 days after his hospitalization he decided to abandon the clinic without the medical release.

 
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