It's ironic how losing her eyesight helped a 20-year-old woman appreciate her life, but this is exactly what happened to Kaylee Muthart from Anderson, South Carolina after a meth-induced attack prompted her to gouge her own eyes out.
Muthart was high on drugs when she took out her own eyes outside of church, according to the Daily Mail. On February 6, Muthart overpowered several passers-by when she started inflicting harm on herself. She truly believed then that removing her eyes was a necessary sacrifice to God, and it took a team of deputies just to get her to stop.
She was rushed to the trauma unit at Greenville Memorial Hospital. There, doctors told her mother, Katy Tompkins, that she was blind. "That was a struggle. I can't even explain that feeling when I found out. It was horrifying. Complete terror," Tompkins told PEOPLE. "It's a horrible thing, but I'm still thankful because God spared her life."
Looking back on the incident, Muthart said that meth gave her a warped sense of religion. She thought that the dead were stuck in their graves and required her to sacrifice her own eyes just so they will be released to God.
"I thought everyone who had died was stuck in their graves, that God was up in Heaven alone, and that I had to sacrifice something important to be able to release everyone in the world to God," she recalled. "It made the world darker, and took everything I believed in and distorted them to make me go down the path to pulling out my eyes."
Muthart remembered feeling scared, but she had a sense of righteousness to fulfill. So without hesitation, she pulled out her eyes with her bare hands and twisted them, pulled them again then popped them. When a pastor showed up, she told him, "Pray for me, I want to see the light, pray for me."
She was forced to stay for an extended time at the hospital and a psychiatric facility, and she only returned home on March 1. But after the drugs were weaned off her system, Muthart began to experience life in a different way. "Life's more beautiful now, life's more beautiful than it was being on drugs. It is a horrible world to live in," she said.
"I'll forget I'm blind sometimes because I know what's around me. Not down to a tee, but I know what my mom's house looks like," she continued. "You still see, but you don't see with your eyes, it's hard to explain because I don't even understand it myself."
