25%
The chances of anyone surviving a cardiac arrest outside/inside a hospital are 25%. If you have any co-morbidities like prior heart attack, stroke, cancer then your odds go way down. Your odds of coming out of the ICU are about the same. I just spent the last month in the ICU. I've help bring people back from death and I've also watched rational people tell me to take them off the breathing machine because they've suffered enough and let them die. I 've told spouses, grandchildren, and kids that their loved one has passed. Up front I'm very frank and I don't tell them if I know for sure if they can go off the breathing machine or if they're going to have the same quality of life before they were in the hospital. I learned that there isn't much you have control over in the ICU where the patients get 1 on 1 care. Their number's can look great but they die so fast or their numbers appear to look like they're going to go that same night but I come back to them the next moring and they still holding on. The only control we have is to think ahead and really wonder if I ever want to be on a ventilator or be kept alive with drugs although our brain function is nil. It sounds morbid but it saves the people around you as well as the dedicated nurses and doctors alot of grief if something catastrophic were to happen to you and those tough decisions have to be made. So what's your Code status . . .you know the odds.