A rare complication of the coronavirus appears to be prolonged and painful erections.
An American victim of COVID-19 experienced priapism (a long-lasting erection) when, doctors believe, the disease caused blood to clot in his penis, according to a new study on the complication.
In August 2020, a 69-year-old obese man was admitted to Dayton Hospital, Miami Valley in Ohio, with a severe case of coronavirus.
The anonymous man, who eventually died of other complications from the virus, was experiencing severe shortness of breath, inflammation and fluid accumulation in the lungs. The medical team sedated him before putting him on the respirator, but his condition continued to worsen.
After 10 days, his lungs began to fail and the man was turned over – an emergency technique used to help air move better throughout his body. After 12 hours, when the doctors turned him face up again, the nurses noticed that his axis was erect.
After three hours, unable to fix the situation with an ice pack, doctors drained the blood from the man’s penis with a needle, successfully correcting the outbreak of priapism. The man was unconscious the entire time.
“Priapism has not occurred again,” wrote three doctors at a Miami Valley hospital in a patient report in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine. However, his lungs did not recover and the patient died in the ICU.
Medical professionals say the symptom is probably caused by an exaggerated immune reaction called a “cytokine storm” and makes sense as a side effect of COVID, which is known to cause blood clots. Non-affiliated doctors say that priapism is still an “interesting” manifestation of the disease.
“We haven’t seen any cases of COVID-related priapism like this and we treat more patients with COVID than any other European hospital, as far as I know, so this is clearly a rare but explainable manifestation of COVID,” surgeon urological consultant Dr. Richard Viney of Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham told the Daily Mail. “In this patient, he had low-flow priapism that would certainly fit with microemboli (small clots forming 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 man who contracted the coronavirus had an ice pack-resistant four-hour erection that also needed to be drained with a needle and believed if it was caused by blood clots. Before contracting the new disease, the man had no history of blood clots.