The 30-year-old was diagnosed with Body Integrity Identity Disorder, where able-bodied people believe they are meant to be disabled. She fulfilled her wishes when she arranged for a sympathetic psychologist to pour drain cleaner into her eyes.
Medics battled to save her eyes - against her wishes - but the corrosive substance melted her eyes and within six months she was blind. She said she can understand why people might be angry about someone giving themselves a disability but says it wasn't a choice but a need, based on a disorder of the brain.
Telling her shocking story, Ms Shuping said her fascination with blindness began early in childhood.
"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. I was 'blind-simming', 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,".
Determined to turn her dream into a reality, Ms Shuping found a psychologist willing to help her become blind and took the necessary steps in 2006.
"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.'
However, over time her eyesight diminished to nothing.
However, over time her eyesight diminished to nothing.
Her left eye suffered a ‘corneal meltdown’ – collapsing in on itself and requiring the eye to be removed – while her right eye had glaucoma and cataracts, and a webbing of scars.I really feel this is the way I was supposed to be born, that I should have been blind from birth.
Ms Shuping’s family have disowned her after learning it wasn’t an accident but she has been supported by her former fiancé Mike, 50, who is registered legally blind – although in his case due to naturally occurring early-onset macular degeneration.
Source: Daily Mail
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