How Dangerous Is LASIK Surgery?

Exotic flowers. Super Bowl halftime shows. Tom Hooper's CATS. There is so much beauty in this world. But the human eye is a fickle mistress, and if you want to see life's majesty in crisp HD without wearing glasses like some kind of a nerd, at some point you might need to consider undergoing corrective surgery, specifically of the laser variety.

Still, the prospect of paying a doctor to fire sci-fi weapons into your delicate eye jelly might seem intimidating. What are the risks associated with letting a surgeon play midnight bowling with your corneas?

To really understand the potential horrors waiting on the other side of that operating theater, it helps to get a feel for what laser eye surgery actually entails. LASIK, which somehow stands for laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis, is the process of using a high-intensity light beam to reshape the cornea, AKA the round front bit of the eyeball. The bare-bones basics go like this: the patient's eye, which, best case scenario has been numbed by this point, is sliced open by a doctor, surgeon, or friend who says that they're like, 80% sure that they know what they're doing. Once your shiny new eyeball flap is peeled back, a laser is directed toward the abnormal tissue in the cornea, chipping away at the unfortunate bits piece by piece until they live up to America's unrealistic standards of inner-eye beauty. The eye flap, which is a spectacular two-word combination that you should definitely bring up at dinner this week, is folded back into place. A few weeks later, if all goes well, the patient's vision is, in medical terms, "less bad."

If all doesn't go well, you're in for a treat. According to the Mayo Clinic, complications in surgery can lead to worsened vision and, if you draw the remarkably short straw, blindness.

But that's a ridiculously short straw. Most of the time, the worst thing a patient has to worry about is dryness of the eyes, which can be fixed with the vigorous application of eye drops. WebMD, generally the go-to spot for medical catastrophization, notes that LASIK patients have a 96% satisfaction rate.