I’ve talked before about spending years (not, you know, full time or anything) fruitlessly searching for something on the internet (the particular elusive title from an elusively named series of middle-grade fiction, the theme song from a vaguely remembered childhood TV favorite) and then, suddenly, finding it, without fully realizing what (if anything) I was doing differently in my search. Of course, as my boyfriend pointed out, the internet has been changing over those years, filling with new information and potential leads.
Yesterday’s search was one that I’ve thought about for – truly – more than 25 years. According to my memory, when I was seven years old my dad and I watched a news program about children in South America who had pinkeye, recovered, and then a few weeks later turned blue and died. This TERRIFIED me until I was 12 (because that was the age of the oldest child who succumbed), and maybe through force of will I avoided coming down with pinkeye for those five years (I don’t think I had it again until I endured it concurrently with mono and a sinus infection my junior year of college). It’s an episode I’ve written about in my manuscript and in an essay I’ve been working on recently, so over the past month it became more urgent to figure out what, exactly, I had watched.
I wasn’t positive that I was seven – I could have been eight. I know it was the fall of either second or third grade, because my best friend was Vanessa, and it was Vanessa’s mom who pulled my dad aside after a play date at their house to warn him that I seemed to have some unresolved fears (AKA all of Vanessa’s baby dolls had come down with cases of “death pinkeye” that afternoon). My mom was in Florida at the time, visiting her parents, and it was November. At least, I thought it was November, but that may have been only because November was always the scariest month for me. But I started to doubt that, as well as my recollection of where the mysterious deaths took place – for some reason South America seemed right, but could it have been Southeast Asia instead? Somewhere else?
“pinkeye deaths 1990s” is not a particularly useful search, but in searching for “children pinkeye deaths” I found several articles about a recent (2014) adenovirus outbreak in New Jersey that killed several children. Pinkeye didn’t seem to be a particular symptom, but I filed “adenovirus” in my mind as a potential culprit. Then I set about trying to determine what the television program had been. Dateline? 60 Minutes? Not the local news, surely. I quickly learned Dateline only started airing in 1992, so it was out. I found a list of 60 minutes episodes, but they were hard to comb through and missing most of 1991. Was it Nova? Scientific American? I Googled “adenovirus outbreak south america 90s” and landed on a scholarly article about deaths in the “cone of South America” in the 1990s, though pinkeye didn’t seem to be prominent. I also texted my dad. His response: “I’m either an inattentive dad or have a dose of creeping dementia,” AKA no recollection of either the show or my response to it.
By that time, though, I had started looking at a list of NOVA episodes, helpfully listed on a Wikipedia page. And lo! There it was, not in November but December 18th of 1990 (so I was seven): “What’s Killing the Children?” (Side note: What a title – no wonder I was terrified.) Googling the exact title turned up a summary that confirmed my suspicions: the show had focused on the deaths of children (mostly under age 10) who had exhibited pinkeye, recovered, and later died of pulmonary distress due to Brazilian Purpuric Fever. As an adult sifting through the vast garbage heap of the internet looking for my grain of sand, I was operating under the assumption that the disease had been, in reality, something rare that simply presented with conjunctivitis as a symptom, that the children who died were probably a minority of those who’d had the illness in the first place, and so forth, but what I didn’t expect was to discover that all of those deaths (okay, all 18) had occurred not in 1990, but in 1984! I don’t think that would have allayed my (symptomatic of OCD) fear back then, but when I watched the show as a child, I took the title literally: I assumed that children my age were dying of this mystery disease right as I sat on our living room floor watching, and that no one knew, in fact, what was “killing the children.”
I was so pleased with my search engine tenacity that I may have made a bit of a scene in the coffee shop where I was working, and also tweeted about it. I just can’t believe I found it after all these years, or that, had my dad and I chosen two weeks earlier (the previous episode of NOVA, which was on biweekly*), I would have seen a program titled “In the Land of the Llamas.” How different could my life have been??
*I cannot get over how phenomenally stupid it is that biweekly can mean either every other week or twice a week. THOSE ARE OPPOSITES YOU JERKS.
PS: What are the chances I can go to the museum of TV and actually WATCH this episode? (I say this having not even done a youtube search yet…) I know they only have representative episodes of each program in their archives, but…
PPS: One of my students had pinkeye last week. I used a fair bucket of hand sanitizer, but only because I didn’t want to catch it and then have to make a doctor’s appointment to get eyedrops.
PPPS: Not to get too high on my internet capabilities, but I feel like I should tutor “google searching,” because most of my students seem convinced you have to type in every single word of the question you’re asking (and spell everything right…and put it in the right order…) if you want results.
