Man suffers agonising 4-hour erection after hurting his FOOT in horror case that left him in ‘Code Black’ in ICU

A MAN was left hallucinating and unable to move or breathe when a routine treatment for his painful, long-lasting erection took a nightmarish turn.

The 39-year-old arrived at a hospital in Australia with a foot injury after his ankle got trapped between a car and a concrete gutter.

He was also suffering from a painful – but unrelated – four-hour-long priapism, a condition of the penis where it remains erect without sexual arousal or stimulation.

While his foot was swollen and bruised, he was still able to walk.

Medics at Flinders Medical Centre in Adelaide, where the bloke was treated, decided that his priapism required immediate attention.

The unnamed man had experienced similar penis issues before and had been treated with lidocaine, a local anaesthetic.

It is injected into the penis to block nerve signals, helping to relax the muscles and reduce the rigidity of the erection before surgery.

However, this time, doctors made a critical mistake.

Writing in Endrology & Infertility, medics explained that the man was given ten times the amount of anaesthetic he needed, resulting in a massive overdose.

Instead of the 200mg solution required, doctors accidentally administered 2000mg.

The man began hallucinating, lost his vision, and couldn’t move, though he could still hear everything around him.

He was experiencing a potentially fatal complication of local anaesthetics, called local anaesthetic systemic toxicity (LAST), the authors said.

Describing the experience in the journal, the man said, “It shouldn’t have happened, and it was the worst day of my life.”

Recognising the seriousness of the situation, the medical team called a ‘code black’- a hospital emergency protocol for life-threatening situations.

The man was rushed to the intensive care unit for continuous monitoring.

He was given oxygen and treated with IV fluids.

A lipid emulsion – a mixture of healthy fats – was also administered to reverse the effects of the overdose.

Despite these efforts, the man became agitated and confused.

Doctors had to intubate him – a procedure where a tube is inserted into his airway to assist with breathing – when he began struggling to breathe.

Meanwhile, the priapism was treated by the urology team, who performed blood aspiration to relieve the pressure.

Afterwards, the hospital carried out a thorough review to figure out what went wrong.

They identified a few key factors, like how the one per cent and 10 per cent lidocaine vials looked so similar, and how the medication wasn’t double-checked before being given to the patient.

After the man recovered from the incident the hospital staff offered their apologies for the potentially life-threatening mishap.

The next day, he started feeling anxious and began reliving some of the LAST effects, like hallucinations, vision loss, and the inability to move when they tried to induce anaesthesia again.

He was discharged after a few later.

At his one-month follow-up, the patient was doing much better, the authors wrote.

His priapism hadn’t returned, and he was able to have normal erections again.