The people of Soapland are subject to a set of special ills. Temporary blindness, preceded by dizzy spells and headaches, is a common affliction of Soapland people. The condition usually clears up in six or eight weeks, but once in a while it develops into a brain tumor and the patient dies. One script writer, apparently forgetting that General Mills was the sponsor of his serial, had one of his women characters go temporarily blind because of an allergy to chocolate cake. There was hell to pay, and the writer had to make the doctor in charge of the patient hastily change his diagnosis. Amnesia strikes almost as often in Soapland as the common cold in our world. There have been as many as eight or nine amnesia cases on the air at one time.-- James Thurber, Soapland.
I remember a situation on, IIRC, "As the World Turns" where one of the characters was laid up for quite some time with locked bowels.
Tried to figure this one as a candidate for father-daughter symbiosis, but all that's done is give me the "locked open" feeling.