A rare complication of the coronavirus has been found to be painful, prolonged erections.
An American victim of COVID-19 experienced priapism (a prolonged erection) when, according to doctors, the disease caused blood to clot in his penis, according to a new study on the complication.
In August 2020, an obese 69-year-old was admitted to Dayton, Miami Valley Hospital in Ohio, with a serious case of the coronavirus.
The anonymous man, who eventually died of other complications from the virus, suffered from severe shortness of breath, inflammation and fluid build-up in his lungs. Medical staff sedated him before placing him on a ventilator, but his condition continued to deteriorate.
After 10 days, his lungs began to fail and the man was turned face down – an emergency technique used to help air move better through his body. After 12 hours, when medics turned him face up again, the nurses noticed that his shaft was upright.
After three hours, unable to resolve the situation with an ice pack, medics discharged the blood from the man’s penis with a needle, successfully clearing the priapism attack. The man was unconscious the whole time.
“Priapism was discontinued,” three Miami Valley hospital doctors wrote in a report on the patient in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine. However, his lungs did not recover and the patient eventually died in the ICU.
Medical professionals say the symptom is likely caused by an immune system overreaction called a “cytokine rush,” and makes sense as a side effect of COVID, which is known to cause blood clots. Unaffiliated doctors say priapism is still an “interesting” manifestation of the disease.
“We have not seen any cases of COVID-related priapism like this and we have treated more COVID patients to my knowledge than any other European hospital, so this is clearly a rare but explainable manifestation of COVID,” urological surgeon adviser Dr. Richard Viney of Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham told the Daily Mail. “In this patient he had low flow priapism, which would certainly be consistent with microembolisms (small clots that form in smaller blood vessels) and this is one of the complications of COVID that we see in many other organ systems.”
In June, a separate study also published in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine reported a similar situation: A 62-year-old who had contracted the coronavirus had a four-hour ice pack-resistant erection that also had to be drained with a needle. and is believed to be caused by blood clots. Before the man contracted the new disease, he had no history of blood clots.