If you ever needed a real lesson in why you shouldn’t do hard drugs, this is it.
Kaylee Muthart is now blind because she gouged her own eyeballs out while out of her mind of crystal meth in February 2018.
She was 20 years old and living in Andersonville, South Carolina when the horrible event occurred.
In front of eye-witnesses, she clawed out her own eyeballs and squished them in her hands.
It eventually took a team of deputies to control Kaylee long enough to render aid before she was placed on a stretcher and flown to the trauma unit at Greenville Memorial Hospital, where doctors worked to clean what was left inside her orbital sockets to prevent infection.
Once Kaylee’s mother arrived, doctors broke the news that her daughter was completely blind.
Kaylee started using methamphetamine—an illegal stimulant that increases the amount of dopamine in the brain—about 6 months before the gruesome incident took place.
Doctors believe Kaylee used meth that was likely laced with another chemical on the day of the incident, which caused her to have hallucinations that the world was “upside down” and hear voices that told her to “sacrifice her eyes” in order to make it to heaven.
Muthart had been awake for almost 48 hours, snorting and injecting a concoction of tainted methamphetamine. “The drugs take your fears and beliefs and amplify them,” she says. “I thought I had to take my eyes out to survive and save the world.”
Doctors are giving Kaylee antibiotic drops to keep her eyelids moistened. They’ve also recommended that Kaylee receive prosthetic eyes to preserve her facial structure and keep bacteria out of the cavities.
Kaylee made her mother promise to get prosthetics that match the aqua green eyes she was born with.
Following the episode, Muthart spent weeks in a psychiatric facility. She underwent a surgery to ready her eye sockets for future prostheses and completed a month-long inpatient drug-treatment program.
She considers herself a recovering addict and says it wasn’t all that difficult for her to achieve sobriety because “the drugs took something from me, and when you get burned by the fire you learn not to go back.”
She makes her own coffee and can still flip an egg in a pan. She has learned to play the piano.
Muthart’s toddler daughter, to whom she gave birth at age 18, is a bright spot. The child lives with a family friend, but Muthart says they talk daily and visit when Muthart can get a ride to the child’s home. “She’s my sunshine,” Muthart says.
