A COVID-19 patient died after experiencing a 3-hour erection that doctors struggled to treat

• 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 was turned on his belly.
• He then developed a three-hour erection that doctors had to drain with needles. He died soon after.

A man experienced a rare COVID-19 side effect, a three-hour erection, before dying from complications related to the disease.

A case report published in The American Journal of Emergency Medicine on January 1 said the 69-year-old man went to the emergency room after medication his doctor had prescribed him didn't help with his shortness of breath.

The man, who had obesity and had been coughing for a week, soon developed a fever. When the ER doctors tested him for COVID-19, the result came back positive.

His health deteriorated over the next 10 days in the hospital. He needed steroids and a ventilator, and he was turned facedown to stimulate air flow through his body, a technique called proning that can help people with COVID-19. About 12 hours later, a nurse discovered that the man was experiencing a strange COVID-19 symptom that had been reported only 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 happens when blood is unable to leave the penis or flows improperly into the penis.

Though only two people are known to have had priapism after being diagnosed with COVID-19, experts say it makes sense that the blood-related condition would occur. That's because a person infected with the coronavirus may experience a cytokine storm, where their immune system goes haywire and creates blood clots, which could affect the penis, Dr. Richard Viney, a urological surgeon at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, England, 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," Viney said.

The man died soon after his erection was cured

First, the hospital staff flipped the man on his back and used ice packs to try to bring his erection down.

When that didn't work, the doctors gave his penis an ultrasound. They saw that his blood vessels were clear and working properly, so they diagnosed him with ischemic priapism, the type that's related to blood-drainage issues.

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. Thirty 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.