Modern technology has made the job of diagnosing heart disease much easier.
We will keep it in laymen's terms, but this imaging machine is a key component in the catheterization lab.
"This comes over the patient. It takes an x-ray at the same we inject IV dye into the coronary artery and that's how we get these pictures here of the coronaries and we can tell if there's any blockages or not," explains Jennifer Ciotola who works as a nurse in the catheterization lab.
The dye Jennifer mentioned is inserted through a catheter.
If a blockage is discovered - depending on the diagnosis - another catheter will be inserted with a tiny balloon on the end.
"So this would be threaded through the aorta again, up through the femoral artery, up through the blockage, sits inside of the blockage. They inflate the balloon and the stent inflates but it stays open. Then they deflate the balloon and the stent would stay there like a scaffolding," she explains.
For our purposes, nurse Sharon has volunteered to be our patient.
The fact is, according to nurse Jennifer, you can end up in this room even after a routine examination.
"If you've had a heart attack, you're going to be in the hospital for 48 hours or so, it depends on your health. And if you've come in just as an outpatient for a diagnostic cath and you end up getting a stent then you would be in the hospital for one night," she said.
That's how good the technology has become.
In the past doctors had simple x-rays to help with their diagnosis.
Obviously, it's better to enter the cath lab under controlled circumstances, but Nurse Jennifer says Castle Medical Center is equally equipped to handle a serious cardiac condition. "Some of them come through the emergency room having a heart attack. We get them in here very quickly in what we call a ninety minute period, door to balloon time."
