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ECMO is often a "Hail Mary" that rarely includes a favorable outcome.

OTOH, perfusion is an under-staffed specialty offering a good career without as much academic investment as an MD. The downsides are the possibility of being on-call and sometimes having to be the one who pulls the plug.

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Having been the recipient of a double "Hail Mary" (extreme rare case - and luxury - of having two ECMO's used to sustain my life for 19-days after full organ failure post-pneumonia + severe allergic reaction to piperacillin/tazobactam) in 2014, and having a close colleague last month also receive ECMO care post-cardiac incident, I'm happy to say that we're both currently looking at 100% return-to-normal with no side-effects. I know there's a large spread of cases where the outcome is not as favourable as ours, but I'm not sure of the statistical curve justifying 'rarely'.

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