Local family cautions others after son’s tragic death following common eye surgery

A local family is speaking out against a common eye surgery, which they say led to their son Ryan’s suicide.

Ryan Kingerski, a 26-year-old police officer, was supposed to go back to work a few days after LASIK surgery last summer at LASIK Plus in Pittsburgh.

“He was charismatic, loving, funny, witty, loved to be around family and friends. He was a police officer at Penn Hills. Loved his job more than anything,” said parents Tim and Stefani Kingerski. “He often said he would do it for free. He was very proud of it.”

The Kingerskis said Ryan chose LASIK surgery, and handed his father his glasses on the way in.  

“He took his glasses off and handed them to me and said, ‘I won’t need these anymore.’”

They now believe that in just seconds, his life was forever changed.

“12 seconds. 12 seconds was what it took for him to have his surgery. It took his life away from him,” Tim said. “On the ride home, he kept saying about how ‘something’s not right with my right eye.’ And I said, ‘what do you mean?’ And he said, ‘well,’ he said, ‘you know,’ he said ‘it’s very foggy. I can’t really see out of it. And the pain in my head...’”

Ryan’s parents say the migraines worsened, as did the pain in his eye, and the blurriness was like looking through cellophane. He spent five months going to cornea specialists, trying steroids and other medications. 

“And each time, reaching out to doctor after doctor after doctor and just being told ‘You just need to look at the world differently,’” Stefani said. “All he wanted to do was just get back to work and get back to work with a normal life. He agreed to have it because it was supposed to make his life better.”

In the fall, Ryan started sharing his story online, including a negative review of LASIK Plus on November 18th.

“On November 19th, we got a letter from Lasik Plus saying that they would no longer see him as a patient.”

We interviewed Dr. Morris Waxler, the former science manager on the LASIK team at the FDA. He authored the book “The Unsightly Truth of Laser Vision Correction”.

“They’ll say they’ve done 2 million Lasik surgeries. They claim it’s 1% big problems, 1% of 2 million people is a lot of people who have irremediable problems,” Waxler said.  

Waxler says LASIK statistics are misleading, and patients aren’t informed of the dangerous risks. 

“What are those serious effects?” asked Cara Sapida. 

“Irremediable pain, constant itchiness of the cornea, can’t drive at night, can’t see details, these are not small matters,” Waxler said. 

We reached out to LASIK Plus and offered them an opportunity to do an on-camera interview. They replied with a statement, saying in part:

“There is no clinical evidence linking suicide to LASIK eye surgery. The safety and effectiveness of LASIK is established by a large body of peer-reviewed clinical data – more than 7,000 individual clinical studies have been conducted over the past 25 years. LASIK studies meet the highest standards for biomedical research. Clinical experience with LASIK involves tens of millions of procedures worldwide. This data and this experience establish LASIK as a safe and effective vision correction option for all those patients who are medical candidates for the procedure.”

The FDA tells Channel 11 that they take the adverse events from LASIK very seriously. They say it’s important for doctors to do a thorough evaluation of patients to see if they’re good candidates -- because they say LASIK is not for everyone.

“The note he had left that says I can’t take it anymore. Lasik did this to me,” said Tim Kingerski, remember his son’s suicide note.

Now Tim and Stefani are sharing their son’s story to advocate and warn others.

“We posted Ryan’s story on Instagram. We posted Ryan’s story on TikTok. Seven million people have viewed his story and the amount of people that have reached out to us to say I was considering it, now I’m not.”

Click here to learn more about possible LASIK complications.

See the full LASIK Plus statement in the below PDF.

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