Dolores Orrico watched her psychiatrist flip a switch and turn a knob. She stared hard as adjustments were made to the machine that’d soon send her into a seizure.

She was lying back in a bed on the second floor of Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in October. Red and black cables snaked from her chest to a heart monitor on the wall. A meter clipped to her thumb checked oxygen levels. And her attention abruptly turned, startled by a sudden shadow, as a resident doctor leaned over the bed to run a cleaning wipe across her brow.

“Don’t,” she told him, smirking. “Don’t mess up my hair.”

He said not to worry and gently affixed EEG leads, neurological sensors, to her forehead. Then she was all prepped. Her psychiatrist held her hand as she slipped into general anesthesia. Another resident, Dr

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