“Our patient has surgery today, would you like to observe?” my doctoring mentor asked.

Of course, I responded eagerly.

Our patient was a 65-year-old woman who had suffered from epilepsy since childhood. Her frequent seizures caused two types of spells. She would repeat words in an endless loop, or she would experience drop attacks, when she would lose all muscle tone and fall.

For some patients, medications alone cannot free them from seizures. Among them, occasionally, an underlying structural abnormality in the brain can be the nidus for electrical disarray. One such abnormality is known as mesial temporal sclerosis, in which the inner part of the temporal lobe, a section of the brain that sits above the ear on both sides and mediates emotions and memory, becomes scarred.

This was our patient’s diagnosis. Today, she was slated to have her scarred brain tissue removed, a “temporal lobectomy.”