A rare complication of the coronavirus appears to be painful, prolonged erections.
One American victim of COVID-19 experienced priapism (a prolonged erection) when, according to his doctors, the disease caused the blood in his penis to clot, according to a new study on the complication.
In August 2020, an obese 69-year-old was admitted to Dayton, Miami’s Miami Valley Hospital, with a bad case of the coronavirus.
The anonymous man, who eventually died of other complications of the virus, had severe breathing, inflammation and fluid buildup in his lungs. Medical staff stunned him before placing him in a ventilator, but his condition continued to deteriorate.
After ten days, his lungs began to weaken, and the man was turned face down – an emergency technique used to make air move better through his body. After 12 hours, when medics turned him upside down again, the nurses noticed that his shaft was upright.
After three hours, unable to resolve the situation with an ice pack, medics drained the man’s blood with a needle and successfully corrected the attack of priapism. The man was unconscious throughout.
“Priapism has not recurred,” 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 that the symptom is most likely caused by an immune reaction called a “cytokine storm”, and this 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 have not seen any cases of COVID-related priapism yet, and we have had more COVID patients with me than any other European hospital, so this is clearly a rare but explanatory manifestation of COVID,” a urological surgeon said. , dr. Richard Viney, of Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, told the Daily Mail. “In this patient, he had a low-flow priapism that would definitely fit in with microembolia (small blood clots 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 experienced a four-hour erection that also included a needle had to be drained. and is thought to be caused by blood clots. Before the man contracted the new disease, he had no blood clots.