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- A 69-year-old man with obesity and a cough came to the ER with trouble breathing.
- When he started to feel worse, he was put on a ventilator and turned onto his belly.
- He then developed a three-hour erection and needed it drained with needles. He died soon after.
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A man experienced a rare COVID-19 side effect, a three-hour-long erection, before dying from complications related to the disease.
According to a January 1 case report in The American Journal of Emergency Medicine, the 69-year-old man went to the emergency room after medication his doctor prescribed him didn't help with his shortness of breath.
The man, who had obesity and had been coughing the entire week before, soon developed a fever. When the ER doctors who wrote the case report tested him for COVID-19, the results came back positive.
His health continued to deteriorate over the next 10 days in the hospital and he needed steroids, a ventilator, and to be turned face-down to stimulate air flow through his body, a known technique called proning shown to work for COVID-19. Around 12 hours later, a nurse discovered the patient experiencing a strange COVID-19 symptom that'd only been reported once before – priapism, or an unintended hours-long erection that can feel painful.
Priapism is rare, tends to affect people over 30, and is more common in people with blood disorders like sickle cell anemia, leukemia, and multiple myeloma, according to the Mayo Clinic. Priapism is the result of either blood being unable to leave the penis, or blood flowing improperly into the penis.
Though only two known people had priapism after being diagnosed with COVID-19, experts say it makes sense the blood-related condition could occur. That's because a person infected with the coronavirus may experience a cytokine storm where their body's immune system goes haywire and creates blood clots. Those 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 which would certainly fit with microemboli [little clots forming in smaller blood vessels] and this is one of the complications of COVID we see in many other organ systems," said Viney.
The man died soon after his erection was cured
First, the hospital staff flipped the man onto his back and used ice packs in an attempt to bring his erection down.
When that method didn't work, the doctors gave his penis an ultrasound. They saw his blood vessels were clear and working properly, so they diagnosed him with ischemic priapism, the type related to blood-drainage issues.
To treat the patient, doctors did a standard procedure for people with ischemic priapism, inserting two needles into the penile shaft to drain the excess blood. They also gave him a decongestant medication and 30 minutes later, his erection was gone.
The man's lungs continued to worsen and he died from COVID-19 complications soon after, though he didn't have another erection during that time.