- A 69-year-old man with obesity and a cough came to the emergency room with difficulty breathing.
- When he started to feel worse, he was put on the respirator and lay on his stomach.
- He then developed a three-hour erection and needed to be drained with needles. He died shortly afterwards.
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One man experienced a rare side effect of COVID-19, a three-hour erection, before dying from complications related to the disease.
According to a case report published on January 1 in The American Journal of Emergency Medicine, the 69-year-old man went to the emergency room after the medication his doctor prescribed did not help with his shortness of breath.
The man, who was obese and coughed the week before, soon started to have a fever. When the emergency room doctors who wrote the case report tested it for COVID-19, the results were positive.
His health continued to deteriorate for the next 10 days in the hospital and he needed steroids, a ventilator and to be turned downwards to stimulate the flow of air through his body, a well-known technique called proning that worked for COVID-19. About 12 hours later, a nurse discovered that the patient had a strange symptom of COVID-19 that had only been reported once before – priapism or an unintended erection for hours that can be painful.
Priapism is rare, tends to affect people over 30 and is more common in people with blood disorders, such as sickle cell anemia, leukemia and multiple myeloma, according to the Mayo Clinic. Priapism is the result of blood not being able to leave the penis or blood flowing incorrectly to the penis.
Although only two known people have had priapism after being diagnosed with COVID-19, experts say it makes sense that blood-related illness could occur. That’s because a person infected with the coronavirus can experience a cytokine storm where the body’s immune system gets out of control and creates blood clots. These blood clots have the potential to affect the penis, Dr. Richard Viney, a urological surgeon at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, UK, told the Daily Mail.
“In this patient, he had low flow priapism that would certainly fit with micro-emboli [little clots forming in smaller blood vessels] and this is one of the complications of COVID that we see in many other organ systems, “said Viney.
The man died shortly after his erection was healed
First, the hospital staff turned the man on his back and used ice packs in an attempt to lower his erection.
When this method didn’t work, doctors did an ultrasound on his penis. They saw that his blood vessels were clean and functioning properly, so they diagnosed him with ischemic priapism, the type related to blood drainage problems.
To treat the patient, doctors performed a standard procedure for people with ischemic priapism, inserting two needles into the shaft of the penis to drain excess blood. They also gave him a decongestant medication and 30 minutes later, his erection was gone.
The man’s lungs continued to get worse and he died of complications from COVID-19 shortly thereafter, although he had no other erection during that time.