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 mum of the student who tore out her own eyeballs while on drugs spoke out one year after the incident.
Back in 2018, Kaylee Muthart was suffering from a drug addiction, recovering from a mental breakdown and experiencing a tumultuous breakup when she ended up permanently blinding herself.
Just 20 years old at the time, she was under the illusion she had to ‘right the world’ when she gouged out her own eyes during a meth-induced psychotic episode in South Carolina, US.
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Muthart’s memories of the terrifying incident are ‘fuzzy’ due to her ‘hallucinating’ but explained to People: “I thought I had to take my eyes out to survive and save the world."
Reflecting nearly a year after her daughter ripped out and squished her own eyeballs, mum Katy Tompkins said she had ‘been given a second chance’.
“Mentally and physically Kaylee has come so far. We take one day at a time, but each of her days gets better,” she explained.
“Her thoughts are very goal-oriented, and now she completely understands her path. Part of that path is to help people with her story.”
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Following the episode, Muthart spent weeks in a psychiatric facility, underwent surgery to ready her eye sockets for future prostheses and did a month-long inpatient drug treatment program.
Tompkins said her daughter is determined as she explained: “When she sets her mind to something, she does it. This is a girl who bought her own car with money she earned from working - before she even got her license."
Muthart went on to attend a school for the blind and was given her first set of prosthetic eyes in 2020. Saving up some cash before returning to her studies, she works in a restaurant and tries to live her life as normally as she can.
However, her life has had a much different trajectory to what she may have imagined as a teenager due to that day she ‘thought everything would end abruptly’ if she didn’t tear out her eyes ‘immediately’.
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Muthart told Cosmopolitan: “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.
"Because I could no longer see, I don't know if there was blood. But I know the drugs numbed the pain.”
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