A man in Iran ended up suffering agonizing pain in his genital area apparently due to complications caused by COVID, The Sun reports.
According to the newspaper, the unnamed 41-year old man had endured penile pain before finally seeing a urologist.
The man said that he started experiencing discomfort after an erection while having sex, and that he had not suffered any trauma in the pelvic area that it could have explained.
Radiologist Seyed Morteza Bagheri and a colleague pointed out in the Clinical Case Reports journal that the patient did have a positive COVID PRC test three weeks prior to the episode in question, with doctors noting that the man exhibited mild symptoms such as fever, cough and fatigue, but did not need to take any medication.
Subsequent tests at the hospital revealed that the patient was suffering from "thrombosis of deep dorsal penile vein", with an ultrasound showing "no [blood] flow" along the vein that runs the whole length of the penis, due to a clot about halfway along the reproductive organ.
The doctors started treating the patient with a blood-thinning medication called rivaroxaban, and two months after the treatment began, the man’s symptoms "were completely disappeared and he had no penile pain during erection and sexual disturbances anymore," as the medics put it.
The patient, however, still experienced "a little pain under pressure at the site of the blood clotting", the newspaper notes.
Bagheri also observed that roughly 20-50 percent of “hospitalised patients with Covid-19 infection have abnormal coagulation tests,” though he remarked that the type of blood clotting the afflicted man had was very rare, as such cases usually occur in people who have a blood clotting disorder.
"Searching the literature showed no previously published similar case of deep dorsal penile vein thrombosis following COVID-19 infection and our patient is the first reported case," Bagheri said.