The room is called the "cath lab" - catheters are used to detect problems you may have with your heart.
"You can go into an artery in your groin or in your arm and thread catheters up to your heart and you just inject contrast which we call x-ray dye to just visualize the arteries and see if there's a blockage," said cath lab nurse Cynthia Westly.
And if a blockage is discovered?
"If you find a blockage, depending on the severity of the blockage, where the blockage is, you can fix it with angioplasty and stenting and we can do that here, during the same procedure or you would be treated - medical management, you would just be given medicines," Westly said.
Nurse Westly is proud of the fact that an entire team is ready to handle a heart patient.
"We have a cardiologist, we have a person scrubbed in with the cardiologist that is a radiology technologist usually with a cardiovascular intervention background, then you have a nurse that gives the medication," Westly said.
While it has all the markings of an operating room, the cath lab differs substantially from a place where open heart surgery might be done.
"Well, this is just a procedure. We don't put you to sleep, we give you relaxing medicine. We're able to talk to the patient the whole time as opposed to surgery, they knock you out and you don't get to help," Westly said.
While it may not be major surgery, work on a patient in the cath lab is important and the results are almost immediate.
"We know then, as soon as we're doing the procedure, we can tell, usually within the first couple of pictures we'll say, we found something we can fix so we know immediately," Westly said.
