A former straight-A student’s world suddenly went black when dangerous drug use led her to claw her own eyes out.
Twenty-year-old Kaylee Muthart, from Anderson, South Carolina, will never see again and must wear prosthetics for the rest of her life.
Ms Muthart had been a star student, even earning a spot in the National Honor Society, while working and smoking marijuana with her friends on the weekends.
She knew addiction ran in her family, so she was careful to stay away from ‘more serious drugs.’
Ms Muthart left school at 17, hoping to work more and save up to go to college, but her decision to drop out sent her life into a downward spiral.
She got in with the wrong crowd and began partying heavily, which eventually led her to drug abuse, a mental breakdown and finally a disturbing act of self-harm.
Just days before going to a rehab facility, 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 tear out my eyes immediately.
Kaylee Muthart was rendered permanently blind after her psychotic episode linked to a heavy dose of methamphetamine
Muthart was high on meth for hours when she began hallucinating about having to make a grand sacrifice to god. She gouged her eyes out until they were hanging on by a nerve
‘I don’t know how I came to that conclusion, but I felt it was, without doubt, the right, rational thing to do immediately.’
Her memories are fuzzy, she said, but based on the small things she does remember and details she pieced together from other witnesses, she explained that she believed she had to meet someone at church.
So she walked along a railroad track toward it.
Her mother had just a day earlier convinced Kaylee to go to a rehab facility.
But Ms Muthart bought meth the day after the plan was made and took a larger-than-usual dose as a final hoorah.
On her way to church, a friend she had been staying with drove by and called out the window, ‘I locked up the house. Do you have the other key?’
She said that in her warped 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, pointer, and middle finger into each eye. I gripped each eyeball, twisted, and pulled until each eye popped out of the socket — it felt like a massive struggle, the hardest thing I ever had to do.’
Since the incident, Kaylee has been fitted for prosthetic eyes, though they will not help or reverse her blindness
The drugs she had taken numbed the pain. She said if a pastor had not heard her screaming, ‘I want to see the light!’ and come running, she likely would have clawed into her brain.
‘He later said, when he found me, that I was holding my eyeballs in my hands. I had squished them, although they were somehow still attached to my head.’
‘I remember thinking that someone had to sacrifice something important to right the world, and that person was me… I got on my hands and knees, pounding the ground and praying, «Why me? Why do I have to do this?»’
Ms Muthard was taken to the hospital and had to be pinned down by at least seven people. She fought so hard that her wrists hurt from the restraints for days.
Doctors performed an emergency surgery to fully remove what was left of her eyes in an attempt to preserve her optic nerves and to prevent infection.
When Kaylee physically harmed herself, she had been walking along train tracks toward a church looking for her friend. A pastor passing by noticed her and called for help
Kaylee Muthart is pictured after she gouged her own eyes out. Doctors performed an emergency surgery to fully remove what was left of her eyes in an attempt to preserve her optic nerves and to 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 filling the socket) and a white spot (her optic nerve endings) where her eyeballs had been.
She said: ‘Activities I used to enjoy, like playing guitar and learning piano, are going to be harder now that I’m blind, but I’m still optimistic.
‘When 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, particularly on nights when I can’t fall asleep.
‘But truthfully, I’m happier now than I was before all this happened. I’d rather be blind than dependent on drugs.’
Ms Muthart says the catalyst to her spiraling happened when a friend gave her a joint laced with meth when she was 19.
It sent her into a transcendent high that she believed brought her closer to god.
She continued to chase that high for years. The teen became hooked on meth, progressing from smoking it to injecting it.
She is sharing her story as a cautionary tale for young people who may be tempted to try drugs.
