Holly’s Story

Holly Gildea is a Graduate Student Researcher in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Program at UC Berkeley

I was burned in a chemical spill in my thesis lab back in 2017. The incident was due to an accidentally thawed -80C freezer in my lab, from which I was pulling racks to put into a rescue -80. Unbeknownst to me, tubes containing the RNA isolation agent Trizol (mostly phenol) had begun to leak in the thaw, and the chemical was leaking off of the racks in what looked like the water from the thawed freezer. While moving the racks, I got some of this on my right hand/wrist and jacket, and it seeped through my jeans on my right thigh. My labmates and I, smelling phenol and seeing my jacket start to disintegrate, quickly realized that something was wrong. As the characteristic phenol numbness turned to burning, my labmates helped me undress, clothed me in a spare lab coat, and got me to a shower. Meanwhile, they called Environmental Health & Safety (EH&S), whose emergency number went to voicemail. A few minutes later EH&S called back, arrived at the scene, and blocked off the area where the spill had occurred to protect against harmful inhalation. While I was in the shower, they agreed to send me to the Tang Center (the health center on campus), but didn’t coordinate transportation or medical response for me. At this point it was clear that my thigh and my hand/wrist had definitely been burned. My labmates scrounged up whatever spare clothes they had around, and so I climbed into our Lab Manager’s Mini Cooper wearing a too-small dress as a shirt and too-small shorts over my burned leg and was transported to Tang. When I arrived, they hadn’t been briefed on the chemical agent. I continued to rinse the burns in a shower. The urgent care arm of Tang sent me to Occupational Health & Safety, the health office responsible for work-related injuries. There, I was supplied with burn treatment supplies like gauze and ointments as necessary.

Over the next weeks, while I recovered from the more severe burn on my leg, I found out that I was not actually supposed to go to Occupational Health, since as a graduate student trainee, I was not covered by the worker’s compensation measures of most contracts. Further, when my Lab Manager tried to file a worker’s comp claim to protect me in case this injury led to further health problems going forward, he was informed I was ineligible for such a claim, since I was not considered an employee. The University then charged me for my medical appointment, which they had said would be covered as a work-related injury. Further, my jacket, clothes, and shoes had all been incinerated after the spill. Luckily, my PI is affiliated with an outside institute, HHMI, which reimbursed me for the cost of new clothes and for my medical expenses. However, I was appalled that the University had walked back so quickly on covering my medical expenses for what was clearly a work-related injury. Phenol burns and inhalation can be fatal when affecting a larger proportion of the body, and truly luck and my own precautions (like wearing plenty of clothing) were the only things keeping the burns non-life threatening. I was so shocked that Graduate Student Researchers, who often work with even more dangerous chemicals and equipment, are brushed off by the University as non-employees only when it’s convenient for them! It seems they would rather fight a wrongful death lawsuit against a grieving parent than provide graduate students with reasonable work safety and medical support for work-related injuries. This experience galvanized my efforts to get involved in union organizing, since no one will hold the University accountable if we don’t do it ourselves.