A former straight-A student’s world suddenly went black when dangerous drug use led her to claw out her own eyes.
Twenty-year-old Kaylee Muthart, from Anderson, South Carolina, will never see her again and will have to wear prosthetics for the rest of her life.
Ms. Muthart had been a top student and even earned a spot in the National Honor Society while working weekends and smoking marijuana with her friends.
She knew addiction ran in her family, so she made sure to stay away from “more serious drugs.”
Ms Muthart left school at 17, hoping to work more and save to attend university, but her decision to drop out sent her life into a tailspin.
She fell in with the wrong crowd and started partying heavily, which eventually led her to drug abuse, a nervous breakdown and ultimately a disturbing act of self-harm.
Just days before entering rehab, Ms. Muthard took a larger dose of meth than she normally would, and was high and hallucinating for hours.
She said: ‘I thought everything would end abruptly, and everyone would die, if I didn’t pluck out my eyes immediately.
Kaylee Muthart became permanently blind after her psychotic episode related to a heavy dose of methamphetamine
Muthart was high on meth for hours when she began hallucinating that she had to make a great sacrifice to God. She gouged her eyes out until they hung on a nerve
“I don’t know how I came to that conclusion, but I felt that it was without a doubt the right and rational thing to do immediately.”
Her memories are vague, she said, but based on the little things she remembers and the details she gathered from other witnesses, she explained that she thought she had to meet someone at the church.
So she walked there along a railway line.
Her mother had convinced Kaylee to go to rehab just a day earlier.
But Ms. Muthart bought meth the day after the plan was made and, as a last hurray, took a larger dose than normal.
On the way to church, a friend she was staying with drove by and shouted out the window, “I locked the house. Do you have the other key?’
She said that in her twisted mind, being locked out of her home was a sign “that my sacrifice is the key to saving the world.”
‘So I pushed my thumb, index finger and middle finger into each eye. I grabbed each eyeball, twisting and pulling until each eye popped out of its socket – it felt like a huge struggle, the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”
Since the incident, Kaylee has been fitted with prosthetic eyes, although these will not help or reverse her blindness
The medicine she had taken numbed the pain. She said if a pastor hadn’t heard her scream, “I want to see the light!” and come running, she would probably have clawed her brains.
‘Later, when he found me, he said I was holding my eyeballs in my hands. I had them squashed, even though they were still attached to my head somehow.”
“I remember thinking that someone had to sacrifice something important to make the world right, and that person was me… I got down on my hands and knees, punched the ground and prayed, ‘Why me? Why do I have to do this?”
Ms Muthard was taken to hospital and had to be held down by at least seven people. She fought so hard that her wrists ached from the restraints for days.
Doctors performed emergency surgery to completely remove what was left of her eyes in an effort to preserve her optic nerves and prevent infection.
When Kaylee physically harmed herself, she walked along the railroad tracks to a church looking for her friend. A passerby noticed her and called for help
Kaylee Muthart is pictured after gouging out her own eyes. Doctors performed emergency surgery to completely remove what was left of her eyes in an effort to preserve her optic nerves and prevent infection
She explained that when she asked friends and family who visited her what she looked like without eyes, they described seeing red tissue (muscle that filled the eye socket) and a white spot (her optic nerve endings) where her eyeballs had been .
She said: ‘Activities I used to enjoy, such as playing the guitar and learning the piano, will become more difficult now that I am blind, but I am still optimistic.
“If I stub my toe or my knee, I think, well, it probably saved me from walking into a wall and hitting my face.”
She added: ‘Of course there are times when I get really upset about my situation, especially on nights when I can’t fall asleep.
‘But honestly, I’m happier now than I was before all this happened. I’d rather be blind than depend on drugs.’
Ms. Muthart says the catalyst for her spiral came when a friend gave her a joint laced with meth at age 19.
It sent her on a transcendent high that she believed brought her closer to God.
She continued to chase that high for years. The teen became addicted to meth and progressed from smoking to injecting it.
She shares her story as a warning to young people who may be tempted to try drugs.