Highway to Heaven

There was a show called Highway to Heaven that was on in the mid-80s. It featured Michael Landon and Victor French as best friends who solved people's problems. Oh yeah, and Michael's character was an angel.
This was one of my favorite shows. I even thought about buying the dvds recently but decided the show is better in my memory. (I have a feeling I wouldn't like it too much if I saw it now.)
But like I said, I loved that show! I can remember most of the epidodes. There was one where a family adopted a child from Asia only to later discover she was biologically linked to her adoptive father. The show focused on racial differences and dealing with prejudice.
This was the basis for most of the shows. It was like an After School Special on crack (wait! that's the tagline for Strangers with Candy. Nevermind.) There was always a lesson in the show. Either I'd learn about overcoming racism or what it would be like for a man to inhabit a woman's body (I don't lie). But the episode that sticks out most in my mind is when Johnathon (Landon's character) and Mark(French's character) were helping an elderly woman. She was having hysterical fits - claiming to have a snake in her toilet. Only, whenever someone came over to look for a snake they couldn't find anything.
Well, there's a scene where Victor's character is calming her down after she claims to see the snake and he has his back to the toilet. Something catches his eye and he turns around to see the snake slithering out of the toilet toward him.
I must have been about 6 when I saw that episode. It was the kind of show that my parents approved of because of it's religious base but I don't think they anticipated the kind of fear that epidosde would evoke.
For months afterward I would refuse to go to the bathroom by myself. At first my family appeased me but after a while no one was willing to follow me into the bathroom just to make sure a snake wasn't in the toilet. So I had to resort to other means of protection. Like constantly stopping to jump up and look in the toilet. Eventually I calmed down and only turned around occasionally to make sure the coast was still clear. But this fear stuck with me for years.
I even did research on the subject. I learned that snakes have been known to get into septic tanks in rural areas but that the odds of having a snake getting in your toilet are very slim. This only alliviated my fears slightly. After all, I go camping a good deal and have been known to visit Montana. But for the most part, this fear is no longer a part of my daily life.
Then I read this.