LASIK is everywhere. The billboards are everywhere. The coworker who had it done last spring and can’t stop talking about it is everywhere. Millions of people have had the procedure without incident, and the industry’s advertising reflects exactly that: clean, sun-lit imagery, satisfied patients, the promise of waking up and simply being able to see. The consent forms exist. The risk disclosures exist. And for most people, the three-day recovery goes exactly as promised, and that’s the end of the story.
But there is another category of patient, smaller and far less visible, for whom the surgery opens a door to something nobody warned them about. Not inconvenience. Not a brief adjustment period. Unrelenting physical pain, lost careers, lost capacity to do the things that made life feel like their own, and in some cases, a psychological collapse that the industry’s statistics do not fully capture. These are the people whose stories rarely make the news, and they rarely make the news because the numbers are small enough that the industry can describe them as outliers.
Ryan Kingerski was one of them. He was twenty-six years old, a Penn Hills police officer in Pennsylvania, and he died by suicide in January 2025, five months after undergoing LASIK. His parents, Tim and Stefanie, have since made his story public. What they are asking is not complicated: they want to know why their son was never told that what happened to him was possible.
What Happened to Ryan
Ryan Kingerski was a 26-year-old police officer in Pennsylvania who died by suicide after his parents say his life became unbearable following LASIK eye surgery. After his procedure, he experienced double and blurry vision, starbursts, floaters, ghostly rings around objects, dry eyes, and relentless eye pain.
Ryan had the surgery at LasikPlus in Pittsburgh in August 2024. His father Tim was with him that day. According to reporting from Today, Tim recalled that Ryan took off his glasses, handed them over, and said he wouldn’t need them anymore. What came next was nothing like the three-day recovery they had been promised.
On the drive home from the clinic, Ryan kept saying something wasn’t right with his right eye. The blurriness worsened, and the migraines came next. His vision problems started immediately after surgery and became progressively worse. He was unable to return to work and struggled to do the things he loved.
Kingerski reached out to a corneal specialist for help with his symptoms and was told his corneas were thin and that his problems were irreversible. That word – irreversible – is the kind of word that closes a door. He had paid for a procedure. He had signed a form. He had been told he was a good candidate. And now a specialist was telling him that the life he had known, the job he had loved since childhood, the ordinary ability to see clearly, was gone.
LasikPlus declined interviews but released a statement saying suicide cannot be attributed to any single cause and that patients are given consent forms outlining risks. In November 2024, three months after the surgery, the family also received a letter from the clinic saying they would no longer see Ryan as a patient.
In January 2025, five months after his surgery, Ryan took his own life. He left a note that read: “LASIK took everything from me. I can’t take it anymore.”
Ryan Is Not the First
One of the hardest parts of this story is how familiar the outline is to anyone who has been paying attention to LASIK complications over the years.
Detroit TV meteorologist Jessica Starr took her life years earlier after posting publicly about her complications following refractive eye surgery. Texas college student Max Cronin also died by suicide not long after undergoing laser eye surgery. His mother reported that complications had prevented him from continuing with school and from working. His family said that in his final note, he blamed the surgery.
A peer-reviewed study published in PMC found details of six patients – mainly young men – who completed suicide after laser refractive surgery. The patient-support website lasikcomplications.com lists approximately 34 patients who either attempted or completed suicide following the procedure. That number is almost certainly an undercount. The people who find their way to a support website are a fraction of those living with the consequences of a surgery that went wrong.
The research shows laser refractive surgery has a 96 percent postoperative patient satisfaction rate, and possible complications including dry eye, blurred vision, glare, and night vision disturbance are usually transient. But sometimes they persist. The word “usually” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it is doing very little work for the people on the wrong side of it.
The Pain Nobody Talks About
When LASIK complications are mentioned at all, they tend to be described as dry eyes and halos, which sounds inconvenient rather than devastating. The reality of what persistent post-LASIK pain actually feels like in the body is significantly more serious than the marketing brochures convey.
Researchers studying chronic pain after LASIK have found that for some patients, what gets labeled “dry eye” is not really about dryness at all. It is nerve damage. There is substantial evidence that the persistent ocular pain some patients experience after LASIK is a manifestation of corneal neuropathy. The symptoms, traditionally called “dry eye,” more closely resemble other forms of persistent pain after nerve injury, suggesting that what develops is a pathological hypersensitivity of the eye’s somatosensory nerves.
To understand what that means in practical terms: corneal nerves are among the most densely packed sensory nerves in the human body. When those nerves are cut during surgery and do not properly heal, the result is not just eye discomfort. Patients with corneal neuropathic pain may experience exaggerated pain that extends well beyond the eye itself, including worsened migraine headaches and pain across the face and jaw. Ryan described a constant buzzing sensation in his face. That is not a side effect that appears in a clinic’s glossy consent form.
Chronic pain of any kind carries a psychological weight that builds on itself, month after month, without resolution. The particular cruelty of post-LASIK pain is that it was self-elected. When LASIK goes wrong, patients must also contend with the knowledge that they chose the procedure, often paid for it themselves, and trusted someone who told them they were a perfect candidate. That self-blame, layered on top of unrelenting physical pain and lost quality of life, is its own kind of trap.
What the FDA Has – and Hasn’t – Said
The FDA has warned that patients are often not fully informed of the potential risks and complications of LASIK. Federal regulators have urged doctors to more clearly warn patients about the possibility of chronic eye pain and other complications. According to FDA draft guidance reported by aboutlawsuits.com, their guidance notes that some patients have reported suicidal thoughts as a result of chronic eye pain following the procedure.
That is a sentence worth reading again. The FDA’s own draft guidance acknowledges that chronic pain from LASIK has been connected to suicidal ideation. That document existed before Ryan Kingerski’s surgery. The question his parents are asking – why wasn’t he warned – is not an unreasonable one.
In a letter the Kingerski family shared with investigators, CBS Pittsburgh reported that an FDA inspector stated there has been persistent under-reporting by ophthalmic clinics, which are not submitting required patient injury data to the agency. The letter also stated that the FDA is “actively looking into sending out a ‘warning notice’ to the public about the risks” of LASIK.
A retired FDA adviser who had originally voted to approve LASIK decades ago said he now regrets that decision after independently reviewing the data. The industry, for its part, consistently points to a less than 1 percent complication rate and a satisfaction rate above 95 percent. About 500,000 Americans undergo LASIK every year, and the American Refractive Surgery Council reports that the complication rate is less than 1 percent. Those numbers are real. They are also cold comfort when you or someone you love is in the fraction of a percent that doesn’t make it back to ordinary life.
What the Kingerski Family Is Asking For
Tim and Stefanie Kingerski are not anti-LASIK advocates in any simple sense. They are parents who buried their son and want to understand why he was never told that what happened to him was possible.
Seven million people viewed Ryan’s story on social media after his parents posted it. Among those who reached out, many said they had been considering the procedure and now were not. That is not a campaign against a medical procedure. That is a family trying to make sure other people have the information their son didn’t have.
Ryan’s family believes the industry is trying to downplay complication numbers and that if patients were given honest, accurate information about real complication rates, they would be better equipped to make informed decisions. LasikPlus responded that suicide cannot be attributed to any single cause and that there is no clinical evidence linking LASIK to suicide. The statement is technically defensible, and it answers almost nothing about what Ryan’s family is asking.
Tim Kingerski pushed back on the idea that Ryan’s death had anything to do with pre-existing mental illness. “I know that my son before his surgery and after his surgery were two completely different people,” he said. Stefanie added: “I just know a guy who talked about how fabulous his life was and how happy he was. We now visit in a cemetery.”
What to Hold Onto Here
There are people for whom grief lives in a particular piece of knowledge: that the person they lost did not have a condition, did not have a history, did not have a warning sign that anyone saw coming. Processing a loss with no precedent in your family’s experience – the kind that arrives suddenly and without a framework for understanding it – is its own form of work that does not resolve neatly.
What happened to Ryan Kingerski does not mean LASIK is evil or that everyone who has had it should be afraid. For most people, it works as advertised. But the existence of a small number of people for whom it doesn’t work, and for whom the consequences are catastrophic, demands something more than a consent form written in the fine print of a pre-op appointment. It demands honest numbers. It demands that surgeons screen more carefully. It demands that when patients come back reporting that something is terribly wrong, they are believed rather than dismissed.
The FDA’s movement toward requiring more transparent patient warnings is a start. It does not bring Ryan back. It does not give Tim and Stefanie their son back, or give Jacob his twin, or repair the particular silence that settles into a family when someone is gone far too soon and far too preventably.
Ryan’s last note said LASIK took everything from him. His parents are spending whatever energy grief allows them to make sure that his death means something, that someone making the same appointment he made in August 2024 stops and asks a harder question before they go in. That is not a small thing to be doing with the worst year of your life.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.