I had a better day.
Long story short, I bumped into the son of a guy I was at university with, whom I haven't seem for at least a couple of years.
Hi is a senior cardiac consultant. He was at the same hospital, but has just moved. He can log on and check all the records.
He asked me in to his house. I'll call him Ahmed
He's carefully gone through all the things I've been told, and checked who told me, how reliable they would be, and given a different picture.
For example, my wife's bypassed kidneys might be scarred forever, useless even, but it's far more llikely that's they'll get to be nearly as healthy as before the "insult" more or less as soon as needed. You only need one.
He's gone through the timeline of what occurred, and come up with a "something over 30%" figure for"hopefully" heart function once it has been given support for long enough.
Normal is 55% upwards, so for a normal older person, 30% isn't so bad.
Cardiology has half a dozen different consutants whose specialisms overlap. One might be a cardiac anaesthetist, another a cardiac interventionist, another a rhythms specialist. All cardiac consultants. I had no idea.
Sure this process may take weeks, but the outlook is nowhere near as dire as I had been told.
At one point I had been called at 4am, "You'd better come in, your wife is gravely ill" by a female consultant I saw today who is delighted to see she is much less bad now. She was all smiles. Sure, my wife couldn't survive if they pulled all the tubes now, but that's not unusual.
So instead of the reasonable assumption that she was going to get worse and die, the position has flipped.
One thing which helps - educate yourself. For example the "LFT's" you always hear them call for on Casualty, ("U's and E's and LFT's ) are very useful in detecting early/ mid/late/ ongoing/recovery reactions by the liver which sorts your blood out. Some spike massively as soon as there's trauma, some are slower. How far they get up, and when they start to drop, are useful indicators. ChatGPT rise gives you simple tables to judge the numbers. and explain the trends.
Thinking about it, even more basic than that, why a failing heart increases the fluid in the lungs and generally, causing oedema (swelling) eg in hands and ankles. If you don't know, look it up. Ask AI.