Written by a LASIK patient with chronic eye pain who survived suicidal thoughts.
What happens with these other elective surgeries is terrible but lasik is the only elective surgery to my knowledge that results in so many suicides. There are two reasons for this.
First, humans have five senses but by far the most important organs of sense are our eyes. We perceive up to 80% of all impressions by means of our sight. Therefore, when vision is compromised, it has a devastating effect on a person’s quality of life.
Second, the cornea is the most densely innervated tissue of the body. For comparison, the cornea has 300-600 times the sensory innervation density of the skin. This dense innervation is necessary since the cornea is the first line of defense against injury to the eye. These nerves prevent you from “poking your eye out.”
LASIK cuts through these corneal nerves. When the nerves are cut or injured they regrow and some end up deformed. The aberrant nerve regeneration results in eyes feeling pain where pain doesn’t exist since the pain receptors of the eye are misfiring (phantom pain syndrome.) Remember, these pain receptors are extremely sensitive (300-600 times the sensory innervation of skin.)
People who suffer with post-lasik corneal neuralgia have eyes that appear fine under standard eye tests yet they look very different under a special high powered research microscope. It is worth noting that ophthalmologists ALMOST NEVER use high powered research microscopes because they don’t want to know the truth. That’s why people like me and likely Jessica Starr saw many specialists who said our eyes looked normal and we just had dry eye but unbeknownst to us, these charlatans were using slit lamp microscope technology that was over a century old. The criminal lasik physicians gladly claimed ignorance that they thought we only had dry eye because “that’s all they could see in their examination.” Of course, these lasik con artists knew the symptoms we were suffering from were consistent with corneal neuralgia that LASIK is known to cause and that their equipment was not capable of seeing this damage.
Based on my personal experience, having this pain stuck in the “on” position is as close to a death sentence as you can get in terms of pain on this earth due to the densely innervated cornea. If the pain cannot be managed, living a long-term life is simply untenable. Without proper pain management, which is very difficult to find since the cause is iatragenic and each patient’s pathology is different, suicide is the only option to some.