Featured Image Credit: SWNS
Topics: Drugs, Mental Health, US News
Jess Battison
Warning: This article contains graphic content which some readers may find distressing
The student who tore out her own eyeballs while taking drugs had a gut-wrenching thought beforehand.
Kaylee Muthart was suffering from drug addiction when she ended up permanently blinding herself at just 20 years old.
Back in 2018, she was recovering from a mental breakdown while also going through a turbulent breakup all ultimately leading to an incident outside of a church in her hometown of South Carolina, US.
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While Muthart’s memories of it are ‘fuzzy’ due to her ‘hallucinating’, she remembers being under the illusion ‘someone had to sacrifice something important to right the world, and that person was me'.
A pastor apparently heard her shouting ‘I want to see the light’ as he ran out to restrain her.
She recalled to Cosmopolitan: “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."
Muthart lost her sight due to this, but it also led to her checking into rehab to kick her drug habit for good. Attending a school for the blind, she also received her first set of prosthetic eyes in 2020 and nowadays works in a restaurant to earn some cash before returning to her studies.
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Having been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, the terrifying incident was somewhat an out-of-body experienced that changed her life forever.
And she explained what was going through her mind at the time: “I thought everything would end abruptly and everyone would die if I didn't tear out my eyes immediately.”
So, she did just that.
“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,” Muthart explained.
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"Because I could no longer see, I don't know if there was blood. But I know the drugs numbed the pain."
While she does often find herself now pondering about what would have happened in her life if things had been different, she says she now tries ‘not to think too deeply about it’.
"I guess when I open the window or crack the window for my cat in the morning, I wonder what it looks like out there,” she told the Daily Star.