A COVID-19 patient had a painful three-hour erection as a result of a virus complication.
The unidentified 69-year-old man from Ohio in the U.S. was diagnosed with a condition known as priapism while in a coronavirus hospital in August.
Doctors wrote about the man's experience in a case report that was published recently in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine.
According to the case report, the man went to the emergency room after respiratory problems experienced for a week - a cough and congestion. Doctors screened him for COVID-19 and the result was positive.
The man's respiratory condition began to worsen in the hospital and he was intubated and put on a mechanical ventilator.
The next day, after changing the patient's position, a nurse found that the man had an erection. The treatment team placed ice packs in the area but the erection wouldn't abate - and lasted more than three hours.
His physicians concluded the prolonged erection is due to ischemic priapism. According to the Mayo Clinic, ischemic priapism - also called low-flow priapism - occurs when blood is unable to leave the penis. In this situation, the priapism of the man was thought to be a result of the blocking of draining venules, which are very narrow blood vessels.
People with ischemic priapism normally have an erection that lasts more than four hours or is not due to sexual interest or arousal.
The patient involved was the second known to have had priapism after a COVID diagnosis. The other man was a 62-year-old man in June 2020.
Experts say it makes sense the blood-related condition could occur as a person infected with coronavirus may experience a cytokine storm where their body's immune system goes haywire and creates blood clots, 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 Dr. Viney.
In this man's case, the blood was drained from his penis. And with the aid of medication inserted into the base of his penis, his erection went down after 30 minutes of treatment. Although he didn't have any more thromboembolic problems, and priapism didn't happen again, the man eventually died from other COVID-19 complications.
