Did You Know Sex Could Kill? Woman Nearly Dies After Sleeping With Her Husband

A couple’s love-making has nearly ended in tragedy after the woman experienced an anaphylactic reaction to a medication her husband was taking, which she got exposed to through his semen.

According to ‘A Cautionary Coital Tale’, a case report published in the American Journal of Medicine, a 46-year-old woman has experienced dizziness, diarrhea and itchiness on her hands and feet after having sexual intercourse with her husband.

The patient was rushed to the emergency room a couple of hours after the onset of her symptoms. The doctors declared that she was exposed to penicillin via her husband’s semen. The case report said that the patient’s husband was being treated for infective endocarditis with parenteral nafcillin and that she was allergic to penicillin. She was reported to have developed urticaria as a child after being exposed to the antibiotic and that she hadn’t been exposed to it since then.

While the authors were unable to obtain a specimen from the patient’s husband in order to confirm detectable levels of nafcillin in the semen, her clinical presentation coupled with the onset of symptoms after sexual intercourse that can make it evident that she was exposed to nafcillin concentrated in the seminal fluid.

The doctors administered antibiotics while she was at the hospital and 24 hours later found her symptoms to be subsiding. She was sent home with an epinephrine pen and was instructed to abstain from sexual intercourse with her husband for another week until his course of antibiotics is completed.

The authors of the case report highlight that this incident is the third time that such a reaction followed vaginal intercourse has been documented. They also note that in the other two cases, the women’s symptoms began less than an hour after sex and both the women were allergic to penicillin. The authors noted that such rare cases reflect the significance of discussing the hazards of allergic reactions to medicines and their potential side effects.

Only about 0.0002% among the general population has reported fatal anaphylaxis to penicillin. In addition to other similar antibiotics, penicillin is known to concentrate at detectable levels in human semen and can be absorbed through the vaginal epithelium during sexual intercourse.