DETROIT _ In a national TV interview, Jessica Starr's husband and mother shared what they believe ultimately led to her death by suicide in December.
They think the Fox 2 Detroit meteorologist's death was related to her struggle with complications from laser eye surgery.
"There was nothing else that we can attribute it to," said Dan Rose, Starr's husband, on ABC's "Good Morning America" on Wednesday.
Starr took her own life in December 2018 roughly two months after having a procedure to correct her vision. She was 35.
In a report by ABC News correspondent Paula Faris, Rose described how Starr knew immediately that "something was not right" afterward.
"She started to complain of incredibly dry eyes. She had almost no night vision. She had starbursts that she was seeing during the day and at night," said Rose.
Before her death on Dec. 12, the popular TV news figure had shared with the public on her Facebook page that she was still dealing with complications from her October 2018 procedure.
"I do still need all the prayers and the well-wishes because it's a hard go," Starr said in one of the videos that chronicled her experiences after the surgery.
Her mother, Carol Starr, told "GMA" that her daughter was having trouble eating and sleeping and expressed doubt that her condition would improve. Both her mother and her husband agreed that she became more withdrawn.
The report also revealed that Jessica Starr reached out to a therapist before her death.
"Her family says she was a completely different person after the surgery," said Faris. "They're going to choose to remember her as the warm, fun-loving, gregarious wife, mother and friend and sister that she was."
Starr had undergone a newer Lasik-like surgery known as SMILE, or small incision lenticule extraction. It was approved in 2016 by the Food and Drug Administration and was performed last year for the first time in Michigan, according to a Detroit Free Press story from December 18.
The SMILE procedure is "fundamentally the same" as Lasik and both are very safe, said Dr. John Vukich, chairman of the Refractive Surgery Clinical Committee for the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery,.
In 2018, the New York Times reported on the potential dangers of laser eye surgery in a story that pointed out the Lasik-related suicide of a 27-year-old military veteran and the complications of a Cleveland kindergarten teacher who had a pain pump implanted in her abdomen to deal with constant eye pain.
The "GMA" report cited the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery's information that clinical data on SMILE shows that sight-compromising complications are extremely rare and occur in less than 1 percent of cases.
