A North Carolina woman says she’s incredibly happy now that she’s made herself blind by having a psychologist pour drain cleaner onto her eyes, KFOR reports.
Jewel Shuping, 30, says she has wished she was blind since she was 6 years old, got herself a cane when she was 18, became fluent in braille by the age of 20, and later started “blind-simming,” which means she would pretend she was blind.
Shuping says her dream of becoming blind is part of her Body Integrity Identity Disorder, which is a disorder where able-bodied people wish they were disabled.
She later started seeing a psychologist in 2006 who agreed to put numbing drops in her eyes before putting drain cleaner into them in an attempt to cause her to go blind.
Shuping says the process burned her skin while the chemicals rolled down her face and that her eyes were “screaming,” but she just kept thinking, I am going blind, it is going to be OK.
Sadly, when she woke up in the hospital later on, she was “enraged” when she could still see and it took roughly half a year for her vision to go away, resulting in one of her eyes being removed, and the other eye developing glaucoma and cataracts.
She says she told her family it was an accident at first but later told them the truth. Her mother has since stopped speaking to her.
Shuping says that while she has “no regrets” about what she did, she still advises people with her condition to seek help and not to go blind the way she did. She also recommends that people suffering from BIID to hold out hope that “perhaps some day there will be treatment for it and just wait for that treatment if you can.”
Source: Cosmopolitan
