The odds were bad: in the time I sat by her side in ICU, I witnessed a half dozen beds "turn over" About half the time the person got well enough get off ECMO and finish recovery on ventilator only, about half the time they simply didn't make it. On one day a man about my age had no further prospect for survival, I didn't get the details, but I gather he likely succumbed to stroke while in coma. It must have happened in the early morning. His body would die as soon as the circuit was disconnected. His mother came in. They shielded off the room. Disconnected him. And she cried. I remember reading to my wife so she wouldn't hear what was going on, if she could hear. It takes about an hour to drive home from that hospital. I cried all the way home... until I knew my kids would be waiting.
The day my wife got off ECMO, one doctor worked harder than anyone else. He was racing. Others came in to wish us well and encourage her to stay strong for a few more weeks on a vent. He was on two different phones, pouring over a screen in the hallway. Must have made 20 calls in the 8 hours it took to transfer us back to a regular ICU. I knew he was turning over our suite, only two percent of ICU beds have ECMOs and he was going to take the next best candidate and put them on it...
The prognosis is we won't really know how much recovery is possible for another 18 months or so, lungs take up to two years to fully recover. If we do everything right and continue to be fortunate, there may be relatively minimal long term complication. The improvement to date is miraculous - as confirmed by a number of doctors, their words. On the positive side, her family has quite good longevity on both sides - all her grandparents, save a war victim, reached advanced age in relative strength/vitality - and she had no underlying health issues so the other organs made it through relatively unscathed, though the circuit challenged both the kidneys and heart to the extent that they depended on their own life support systems before function returned to normal. She is free of all external life supports save supplemental oxygen and has been "training" daily - periods of zero external O2 support.
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