When we think about the perils of drugs, we normally talk about how they can ruin relationship or cause you to crash your car or overdose.
A young woman named Kaylee Muthart is now blind after, in a drug-fueled state, she ripped out her own eyes.
At the time, she believed that she was offering them to God.
People reports that 20-year-old Kaylee Muthart gave people a huge fright when she gouged out her eyes with her bare fingertips in front of a church in Anderson, South Carolina.
Concerned worshipers emerged from a church upon hearing Kaylee’s cries of “I want to see the light!”
To their horror, they discovered a woman in a state of delirium, clutching her still-attached-yet-crushed eyeballs in her hands.
She reported fought off people who came over to try to help her, and had to be restrained to be transported to the hospital for treatment.
Hospital workers could not save her sight, of course, but they were able to clean out her eye sockets in order to prevent infection.
Police believe that she was on methamphetamine that was laced with something else on the night in question.
Kaylee’s mother, Katy Tomkins, who has six other children, talks about how she responded to the news.
“That was a struggle, I can’t even explain that feeling when I found out, it was horrifying. Complete terror.”
It’s not even something that most parents worry about, but it would be anyone’s nightmare.
“I was thankful she was alive, but I knew something was wrong with her.”
Kaylee had been using meth for about six months, and Tomkins had already been alarmed.
“The day before it happened, which was my birthday, I was getting ready to have her committed, just to get her off the streets and away from it.”
She’ll always regret having waited.
“But I was too late.”
So what, exactly, was going through Kaylee’s mind?
In her delusional state, she believed that the world was “upside down” and that she needed to “sacrifice her eyes” to God if she wanted to get into heaven.
As Kaylee tells Cosmopolitan, it all started when she smoked pot laced with meth. Marijuana on its own is usually harmless.
She felt a strange high at the time and, as someone who was a religious Christian, she felt closer to God and felt compelled to seek a repeat of this experience.
(She was also, as she later learned, bipolar, which left her more vulnerable to addiction than others)
“So,” she explains. “I pushed my thumb, pointer, and middle finger into each eye.”
This is horrifying on every level.
“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.”
Katy Tomkins speaks about her daughter’s recovery.
“She’s been doing wonderfully. Each day at a time, she just gets a little better and better.”
Kaylee has to move back home as she adjusts to living without her eyesight.
“She’s getting all different kinds of treatment, but she’s going to have to relearn everything. It’s like she’s almost starting life over again.”
Tomkins has started a crowdsourcing page to raise money to get her daughter a guide dog. But she’s still processing it.
“I still haven’t grasped it yet. I can hardly look at her pictures right now, and I can’t think of her not being able to see.”
She has little realizations of what her daughter’s life is now like.
“I don’t like the dark, and I think, ‘Oh my gosh, that poor thing will always be in the dark.’”
Tomkins believes that this can be a cautionary tale for others.
“This is something you never think is going to happen to you, but it did.”
She says that her daughter’s relatively brief stint as a meth user horrified her.
“A lot of the mothers I talked to have kids that have been addicted to heroin for 10, 15 years and I’m like, ‘How did you get through it?’ My daughter was doing it for six months and it literally tore me up.”
And that was before her daughter blinded herself.
“I don’t know how I’m getting through it, but she has given me strength. It’s weird to say, but she uplifts me right now and she’s the one that can’t see. That’s just the kind of person she is.”
That is touching. People are more than their addictions, folks.
“I’m thankful. It’s a horrible thing, but I’m still thankful because God spared her life.”
