Ari’s Testimony – Part 2

I wanted to submit a couple more things that happened to me while I was at Elevations RTC because I think they’re important, and due to some of the trauma I have my memory is a little bit messed up which is likely why I forgot to include them initially.

On my literal first day at Elevations, my teammates made it clear to me that I got the room that had bed bugs. I hoped that they were exaggerating, but this was not the case. I woke up the next morning with a few itchy bites, but it was nothing more than an annoyance. Little did I know that the dorm would suffer from bed bugs for an entire year. It was only some of us that got the worst of it, including me. I would wake up with 20+ swollen bites covering my legs, and the nurses would just give me hydrocortisone and send me on my way. They said the only way the higher ups would believe us would be if we caught a bed bug as proof and they saw it. So eventually the staff and I managed to catch a beg bug in a UA cup and brought it to nursing, but nothing happened. There were countless nights where I could literally feel them crawling over my legs, and sometimes I opted to sleep on the floor hoping that I could escape them. It was absolutely disgusting. Eventually (after about a full year) our mattresses got replaced and everyone had to put every one of their belongings into trash bags and leave them outside in the sun all day in order to kill the bugs (?) It was super weird and took so much time and stress and I was still getting bitten nightly.

Secondly, about a month into my stay, I began to develop a fingernail infection. My left index finger began to swell and turn slightly purple, and I noticed that my fingernail was partially falling off because of the swelling. It scared me because it was painful, and my finger eventually became basically unusable. I couldn’t count how many times I came to nursing about it, but they never did anything. Over about two months my fingernail was slowly pushed off of my finger because it was so swollen, and by the end my finger was double the size of a normal one and completely purple. (with no nail) It was only then that I was taken to the hospital where they had to inject me with a local anesthetic and cut my finger open with a scalpel and drain all of the infected blood and pus. It was scary and disgusting and I was missing a fingernail for months after they drained it before it grew back.