"I agree! Most backlashes will not just strike newly awakening espers dead on the spot but some of them come close and it looks like if some awakening esper had to show up in this timeline I am a relatively good choice because I don't need to mystify any doctors and can mostly rationally account for my own delusional symptoms!"

"What ones come close!"

"Oh, a lot of them aren't even psychological at all! Fever, say, that's a simple one that'd kill you if you couldn't go to the hospital and have them put you in an ice bath - fever drugs wouldn't work and somebody with that backlash in this situation would cook a few layers off their brain while the doctors came to terms with a magical fever that wouldn't go down."

"How strange, that drugs don't work and ice does.  Is that universal, by equivalent?"

"I'm not actually sure if ice baths are the ideal protocol for a fever backlash but that's the general trend, that if there's an effect operating on - physics rather than solely biology - you can physics back at it, but the biology isn't listening, the biology is doing magic curse things instead. There are actually some pills that help with backlash but I can't remember the whole chemical name and it doesn't touch awakening, the use case is, like, you were in a dungeon with your partner and your partner died and you need to get through the meet-and-greet process to find a new one."

"Is it possible to affect adjacent biology?  If your fever gives you a headache in the course of brain-cooking, can you treat that normally?  It must work at some remove, or at least not be known not to; you accepted the painkillers earlier..."

"Well, my backlash doesn't directly feature any physical pain. Unless the antipyretic properties in normal painkillers are indicated in their mechanism of action I'd expect them to work fine on the hypothetical fever esper's headache."

"Do relevant drugs cause active harm or merely fail to help?"

"I expect them to still have all their side effects? And I guess there could be some case where, like, if you fail to metabolize some chemical in one way the next thing it does is bad, but I'm not a doctor. I was going to be a doctor, if I didn't awaken... not a pharmacologist though."

"What kind?"

"I was going to go into epidemiology!"

"Oh cool!"

"I wanna put malaria in the ground!"

"Nice!  Or, I mean, now you're maybe going to be an esper instead?"

"If I can get home. Espers make good money, though, there's charities about malaria."

"Sense."

"A piece of information - which I have yet to determine the relevance of - is that I am a pharmacologist.  To a first approximation."

"Well, if I get really annoying and you want to sedate me I'm not opposed in principle but I don't know how much other stuff there is like the concussion thing."

"Yes, do let's see how the painkillers pan out before trying anything stronger.  Are you genuinely more concerned for our annoyance than your discomfort, or are you worried that annoyance would lead to practical negative consequences for you?"

"Oh, I'm dreadfully concerned for my comfort over other people's annoyance or I would have probably not asked a random stranger to call me an ambulance and then accepted your hospitality instead, I actually feel pretty guilty about it when the social anxiety symptoms are kicking me too hard but it seems robust so far that I would way rather comfortably survive the week than not impose on you when I'm pro-surviving at all. I'll just sometimes be apologetic about it. I think probably even if you are very irritated with me at some point you would call me an ambulance instead of kicking me out into your gravel driveway with no shoes on."

"Would you hedonistically prefer to be sedated at least some of the time if you knew it were safe."

"If I knew that, yes. I think some people just fall into comas and I am occasionally longingly considering the virtues of comas. I'd probably panic on the way out of consciousness about the likelihood of being left alone in my coma bed, but, like, not for very long, since, coma. It just seems unlikely to be knowably safe."

"Indeed.  But there are shorter-lasting knockout drugs which are about as safe as coffee and which I'm beginning to wonder whether you simply don't have, without a culture where sabotage and its like are common."

"...can you explain how a culture of sabotage etcetera makes these drugs exist? Like, I'm pretty sure lots of people would love a sleeping pill that was as safe as coffee - I guess if it doesn't produce actual sleep it's less useful but you'd see it for, like, claustrophobes in MRIs, dentistry, the sort of thing they do twilight anesthesia for but only if the patient really can't stand it because it's not as safe as coffee."

"I could easily be misattributing the cause, but we do have something which gets used for those things - in addition to skipping medium-length plane flights for some small but notable fraction of travellers - which was originally developed for adversarial purposes.  It's somewhat limited in availability largely because of the potential for abuse to other parties, not because it's dangerous for personal use."