A rare complication of coronavirus appears to be prolonged and painful erections.
A new U.S. victim of COVID-19 experienced priapism (a long-lasting erection) when, according to doctors, the disease caused blood to clot in the penis, according to a new study on the complication.
In August 2020, a 69-year-old obese man was admitted to Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio, with a bad case of coronavirus.
The anonymous man, who eventually died due to other complications of the virus, was experiencing severe breathing, inflammation and an accumulation of fluid in his lungs. Medical staff sedated him before placing him on a ventilator, but his condition continued to deteriorate.
Ten days later, his lungs began to fail and the man turned upside down, an emergency technique used to help the air move better throughout the body. After 12 hours, when doctors turned it up again, the nurses noticed that its axis was erect.
After three hours, unable to resolve the situation with an ice pack, doctors drained the man’s blood penis with a needle, successfully resolving the priapism crisis. The man was unconscious the whole time.
“Priapism did not recur,” three doctors at Miami Valley Hospital 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 excessive immune reaction called a “cytokine storm” and that it makes sense as a side effect of COVID, which is known to cause blood clots. Non-affiliated doctors say priapism remains an “interesting” manifestation of the disease.
“We have not seen any case of COVID-related priapism like this and we have treated more COVID patients than any other European hospital I know of, so it is clear that it is a rare but explicable manifestation of COVID,” he told the Daily Mail the consulting urological surgeon, Dr. Richard Viney, of Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham. “In this patient, he had low-flow priapism that would surely fit with the microemboli (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 boy who had contracted the coronavirus experienced a four-hour erection resistant to the ice pack that also needed to be drained. with a needle. and is believed to have been caused by blood clots. Before contracting the new disease, the man had no history of blood clots.