The mother of a 20-year-old US girl who was found gouging out her own eyes while outside of a church has spoken out to reveal how her daughter is recovering and warning others about the dangers of illegal drugs.
Kaylee Muthart, caused a terrifying scene for local residents in Anderson, South Carolina, when they found her gouging out both of her eyes with her own hands while in a drug-induced hallucination on February 6.
Locals attempted to help Kaylee, but in her state she fought off those who tried to stop her. 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 a nearby hospital.
‘That was a struggle, I can’t even explain that feeling when I found out, it was horrifying. Complete terror,’ Katy Tompkins, Kaylee’s mother, told PEOPLE. ‘I was thankful she was alive, but I knew something was wrong with her.’
Katy reveals that her daughter started using methamphetamine around six months before the 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.’ PEOPLE further alleges that Kaylee would have heard voices that told her to ‘sacrifice her eyes’ in order to make it to heaven.
Tompkins says the family tried to convince Kaylee to get help, and just days before her hallucinogenic episode, Kaylee told her mother she would enter rehab the following week.
‘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,’ Katy says. ‘But I was too late.’
More than two weeks after the horrifying incident, Kaylee is still in hospital. Doctors have told that she is making progress, but it will be a ‘long road to recovery.’
‘She’s been doing wonderfully. Each day at a time, she just gets a little better and better,’ Tompkins says.
Once Kaylee is released from hospital she will move back in with her mother, who will help her adjust to life without sight.
Katy has also set up a GoFundMe page to raise funds for a seeing-eye dog, which has since raised about half of its $8,000 goal.
Katy has received messages from other parents whose children have been addicted to drugs.
‘This is something you never think is going to happen to you, but it did,’ she explains. ‘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.’
This article originally appeared on New Idea.
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