that once a patient is intubated, lined, and on life support it’s just a waiting game.

You take what the patient has given you and try to stabilize it and, in the meantime, prevent your intervention from killing/harming them as well, but also being able to diagnose and manage other complications as they arise. Then, it’s a matter of time when the patients body is going to get better or not.

The hard part of medicine is diagnosis and differentials and this is where physicians specialize. Once you have the course of action you can pass off maintenance/autopilot to a skilled and experienced CCM NP/PA, which are however not overly common.