Woman deliberately blinds self to fulfil life-long wish

A 30-year-old woman from North Carolina, United States, who has been obsessed with the idea of being blind right from childhood, had finally fulfilled that long held desire by deliberately damaging her eyesight.

Jewel Shuping, according to Barcroft TV,who nursed in insane desire, grew increasingly soaked in the thought of living life without one of her most vital senses – eyesight – trying different strategies over the years to make that dream come true. 

“My mother would find me walking in the halls at night, when I was three or four years old,” she said. “By the time I was six, I remember that thinking about being blind made me feel comfortable.”

Shuping spent hours staring at the sun as a child, hoping it would damage her eyes and by the time she was a teenager, she started moving around in thick black sunglasses. At 18, she got her first cane and became fully fluent in braille by the time she eventually clocked 20.

“I was blind-swimming, which is pretending to be blind, but the idea kept coming up in my head and by the time I was 21 it was a non-stop alarm that was going off,” she said.

In 2006, the 30-year-old found a psychologist willing to help her become blind. He put numbing eye drops followed by drops of drain cleaner in each of her eyes. The pain was excruciating, but the thought of going blind kept her happy.

“My eyes were screaming and I had some drain cleaner going down my cheek burning my skin,” she said. “But all I could think was ‘I am going blind, it is going to be okay.’”

Shuping was then rushed to the hospital where medics tried everything to restore her vision. “When I woke up the following day I was joyful, until I turned on to my back and opened my eyes – I was so enraged when I saw the TV screen,” she said.

But in less than six months after that period, her eyesight slowly diminished to nothing. When her family members came to know what she had done, they disowned her. But she has received support from her ex-fiancé, Mike, who is naturally blind. Shuping is now studying for a degree in education and says she has no regrets for what she did.