They say redheads are more sensitive to medicine and while the quality of my redness has been debated it must be said I am indeed bowled right over by most medications.
When I got on anti-virals for my immune function the standard dosage had me curled up in the fetal position sobbing in agony. We had to cut it back twice before I could tolerate it.
So when I went in to get Lasik they told me I’d be on a Xanax. The nice lady nurse showed me to a dark room before surgery and told me to take the pill.
“Can I start with half?”
She gave a patronizing smile and said, “Sure, then we can have you take the other half if it’s not enough.”
“Sure,” I agreed in the same tone.
No time passed until I was higher than I’ve ever been in my life which is saying something. She was astonished when she collected me that I was as floppy as a ragdoll and barely sensible enough to walk ten feet.
I was hustled into the surgery room and laid down. I’d been shown the room previously, and the teddy bear I’d hold along with the tech who would hold my hand. I had privately thought those touches were a bit silly.
Then I was lying there disconnected from reality by a wide margins with thoughts floating along on puffy technicolor clouds and the teddy bear was the grandest most comforting thing I could imagine. I loved the nurse holding my hand.
I did my best to focus on the machine and the dot above me, but even now I can barely recall the experience. Just the slightly unpleasant pressure on my eyes that I didn’t care about in the slightest. I also the smell of burning meat but I was high enough not to care that it was me on the menu.
Twice the tech shook my shoulder and insistently reminded me, “Look up, don’t fall asleep, you need to look up.”
I tried to obey but I wished only to curl up with the teddy bear in a perfect pharmaceutical haze.
Afterward the nurse had looked at the half tablet I had left of Xanax and doubtfully said, “You could take it at home if it wears off too soon.”
just a reminder that there’s a clip of charles leclerc where he says he just doesn’t wear his prescription glasses bc he doesn’t need them but with them he “can see more perfectly”
like sir?? you are a RACECAR DRIVER. you’re going 200 mph. PLEASE wear your glasses while driving your fighter jet of a car. or if you really hate wearing glasses THAT much. I think you can afford lasik.
On 3rd March I went for my LASIK evaluation appointment.
Before they can even consider doing the surgery, they run a lot of tests to make sure your eyes can actually handle it. And when I say a lot… I mean a lot. My eyes were scanned by different machines at least six times and I genuinely lost count of how many times they put drops in my eyes.
At one point they had to dilate my pupils, which alone took about thirty minutes. Once those drops kick in your pupils become huge and everything goes blurry.
Most of the tests were basically machines scanning my eyes and making these weirdly beautiful maps of the cornea. One of them is called a Pentacam scan, which creates a 3D map of the front of your eye.. showing the shape and thickness of the cornea.
Those colourful circles are basically a topographic map of the eye. The colours show how the cornea curves and how thick it is in different places. They check these to make sure the cornea is healthy and strong enough for LASIK.
After about two and a half hours of tests, I finally met the doctor who will actually be doing the surgery. She went through all the reports and said everything looked really good... she said my "corneas look beautiful, they are healthy and thicker than average"...
Because of that, she actually recommended bladeless Contoura Vision instead of standard LASIK. It’s a slightly more advanced version that uses scans to guide the laser.
So apparently I have very nice corneas.
I never in my life thought I would receive a compliment about my corneas, but here we are.
Conclusion: It is now a medically confirmed fact that my corneas are beautiful… and also thicc.
“Literally the worst decision I ever made in my entire life.”
LASIK is marketed as a miracle cure for vision problems. But behind the glossy promises lies a billion-dollar industry built on questionable research and incomplete information.
The surgeons who perform LASIK often tout a customer satisfaction percentage rate in the high 90s and a complication rate of less than 1 percent, backed by an FDA survey. “That’s less than 1 percent of anything—infection, dry eye pain, halos—it’s an all-in risk of less than 1 percent,” says Ashley Brissette, MD, an ophthalmologist who performs LASIK and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology. “There [are] very, very few surgeries that can quote that same level of complication.”
Other experts who have reviewed the research on LASIK complications—beginning all the way back in the late 1990s, when it was first put on the market, until now—suggest bad outcomes happen at a rate closer to 30 percent or higher. Among those experts is the FDA regulator who initially helped get LASIK on the market, Morris Waxler, PhD.
Waxler was the branch chief of the FDA who oversaw the approval of LASIK back in 1999. Most recently, in 2022, the FDA proposed new draft guidance for manufacturers, in part because of “concerns that some patients are not receiving and/or understanding information regarding the benefits and risks of LASIK devices.” Years later, the draft guidance still hasn’t been implemented, partly due to protests from LASIK surgeons, alleges Waxler. “It’s a dishonest enterprise,” he claims.
From Waxler’s perspective, the data that originally got LASIK approved was based on weak science. Regulators had incomplete information, and, most importantly, the approval process didn’t involve patients directly, he says. The studies were also too short in duration and only followed up with patients at 12 months post-op, which means they weren’t able to capture the long-term effects of the surgery or the rate of regression. (It’s a problem that persists today. The FDA survey that yielded a complication rate of less than 1 percent? It checked in with patients at one, three, and six months.)
Getting LASIK approved by the FDA wasn’t as rigorous a process as one might assume. “It’s not like a typical clinical trial,” Waxler says. When going to the FDA for approval, presenters have more control over how a study is designed and the information they share with regulators. Plus, since surgeons already had access to lasers for other eye surgeries, LASIK was being performed illegally, so the FDA was incentivized to approve the procedure quickly so it could be regulated.
It wasn’t until after Waxler retired from his position at the FDA in the early 2000s and received a call from Paula Cofer, who was dealing with LASIK complications of her own, that he realized there was more to the industry than meets the eye. The “pain, suffering, and intractable consequences” he heard about from Cofer and other patients led him to contact his old colleagues at the FDA, but “they were very dismissive,” he says.
After talking with Cofer and other LASIK patients, Waxler changed his mind on the surgery and looked back at everything that had gone wrong in getting it on the market. He thought he got the full story when LASIK was going through the approval process. “That turned out not to be the case at all,” Waxler says.
The Hidden Risks Of LASIK
So, what exactly are the dangers of LASIK and related corrective vision surgeries? The most common symptom to expect following LASIK is dry eye, which is something a performing surgeon likely wouldn’t dispute. It goes “hand in hand” with LASIK and similar procedures, says Dr. Brissette, who is also a dry eye specialist.
With LASIK, the number is steep: Up to 75 percent of patients complained of chronic dry eye at least four years later, according to a 2025 study in Ophthalmic Research. Dry eye after LASIK is a result of nerve damage caused by the laser, according to Pedram Hamrah, MD, a cornea specialist who treats dry eye and neuropathic pain at Tufts Medical Center. (And women tend to experience more severe dry eye symptoms, possibly due to how different hormone levels affect tear secretion, per a separate study in the Journal of Clinical Medicine.)
But sometimes the nerve damage doesn’t stop at dry eye. Between 10.5 and 13.3 percent of patients experience neuropathic corneal pain—a chronic condition in which the brain sends frequent, abnormal pain signals to the eye—one year after LASIK or similar surgeries, according to a study published this year in the British Journal of Ophthalmology. At six months, an even higher number—24 percent—of patients report experiencing ocular pain, per a recent study in Ophthalmology.
There’s also the potential to develop visual distortions like glare, halos, starbursts, and double vision, according to the FDA’s 2022 draft guidance, which states that 41 percent of patients experience these symptoms six months post-op. The visual distortions can be caused by scar tissue, changes in how the eye focuses when the pupils dilate in lower light, and corneal bulging. (Corneal ectasia is a type of corneal bulging, and your risk may increase if you become pregnant after getting LASIK, even years later, per a study published in the Indian Journal of Ophthalmology.)
You also might notice more floaters, which occur in between 20 and 85 percent of patients, per an older study in Cornea. This could be a result of suction during the procedure.
This is another hard truth: LASIK might not work—and if it does, it might not last. In a 10-year follow-up study, researchers found that over 75 percent of LASIK customers whose myopia was corrected experienced regression of one diopter or more, according to the Korean Journal of Ophthalmology. Initially, though, over 95 percent of patients reach 20/20 vision, says Dr. Brissette. (Another thing to keep in mind: LASIK cannot stop the natural aging of the eye, which means that it won’t prevent you from needing reading glasses down the line, Dr. Brissette notes.)
Beyond the statistics, though, are real humans grappling with these effects and more.
Sarah McSwan, 45, got LASIK in both eyes in 2020. “Literally the worst decision I ever made in my entire life,” she says of going through with the surgery. Instead of getting up from the operating table with clear vision on that August day, McSwan had blurry vision and “excruciating” pain once her meds wore off, she describes.
“In the very beginning, I would walk down the hallway and the breeze would burn my eyes just from walking,” she says, adding that it felt as if there were constant smoke or sunscreen in her eyes. They burned. They itched intensely. They were gritty. Today, even after years of seeing specialists and trying new treatments, “it feels like there’s always a foreign object in them,” she says, or “like the top layer of my eyes is scorched or charred.” McSwan never achieved 20/20 vision.
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Understanding The Realities Of LASIK Complications
In her consultations, Dr. Brissette says that glares and halos are “normal phenomena of the optics of the eye” and can occur while your eyes heal post-LASIK, but that they should resolve over time. She adds that symptoms like dry eye and visual disturbances are “part of the healing process.”
For Kirsten Martin, 37, who got LASIK in November 2022, the visual disturbances and other vision changes were so serious that she spent her first six months following the surgery “in shock,” she says. “The halos were out of control—it felt like somebody was lighting fire to the nerves between my eyes.” Martin also had persistent halos and floaters at night, which led to nightmares for the first few weeks. “It’s a lot to take in,” she says.
Her experience was a striking contrast to what she’d heard before the procedure. After her consultation, Martin was left under the impression that it was going to be “this easy surgery” and that “I was an easy candidate—that I would just be in and out.”
People who have gotten LASIK are also at risk for a flap dislocation—which could happen at any point for the rest of their lives. This is because the flap created by the laser is attached “with the strength of a contact lens,” according to Dr. MacKay. Going swimming, playing contact sports, or rubbing your eyes vigorously could potentially dislodge the flap—though Dr. Brissette says that flap dislocation occurrences are “extremely rare.” Studies say that flap displacement happens in anywhere from 1 to 8 percent of patients.
Following her LASIK surgery in January 2019, Kat Woodhouse, 57, experienced three back-to-back flap detachments in her left eye, all while her right eye was infected. “I couldn’t see anything,” she says. “I saw lights, shadows, colors, and extremely blurry shapes.”
Woodhouse couldn’t drive or work and was in “severe pain,” she says. “It felt like someone poked me in the eye with a needle.” Her eyes were extremely sensitive and couldn’t handle most light sources, from LEDs to sunlight. Eventually, she needed to get three stitches in her eye to hold the flap in place and was offered Motrin for the pain. Today, Woodhouse has cataracts, a vision-impairing condition that LASIK patients were found to develop seven years earlier than non-LASIK patients in a recent study in International Ophthalmology.
All LASIK patients also lose contrast sensitivity, which is the ability to distinguish between shades of gray, Dr. MacKay says. Their surgeons wouldn’t spot this because the main test done after LASIK—a standard vision test—asks patients to read black letters off a white background, which has a high contrast.
This might also explain why there’s such a discrepancy in the reported rates of happy customers, according to Dr. MacKay. “They count a complication only if the eye cannot see 20/40—not 20/20—without glasses in a room where they’re looking at a chart with straight black letters on a white background,” she explains. “You can have a patient in horrible pain, who got an infection under the flap, who’s totally disabled because of starbursts and halos and can no longer work, hates what happened, is suing the surgeon, but it’s not a complication.”
Essentially, you may not consider your laser eye surgery a success, but your surgeon might. (Dr. Brissette would not consider that example scenario a success, she says. She factors in the “complex system” that makes up vision, including how the brain and eyes work together, and overall patient satisfaction.)
