woman loving writing

🔪series:

garsantos 🍜🛏

wips:

🌟All the things we cannot cure(E): post season 2 Garsantos

“ if, perchance, you should grieve at all, let her not perceive it; and laugh when, within yourself, you could have wept. — Ovid, Remedia Amoris

The thing about the words we say, even the ones we mean to say, is that we can never really tell how completely they might unravel a life. And for Yolanda Garcia, who has built herself carefully around discipline, distance and the absolute refusal to need anybody at all, it only takes one badly timed sentence for everything to begin coming apart.

completed:

⭐Three goats and a baby(T): what if Garsantos foster Baby Jane Doe

When Trinity Santos heard the doorbell ring, the last thing she expected to find was a six-week-old infant wrapped in a yellow blanket and left on her doorstep. The second last thing she expects is to agree to keep her.

Now, between hospital shifts, unresolved feelings, and a “strictly casual” situation with a certain surgical resident, Trinity finds herself playing house in a way she definitely did not sign up for. Huckleberry’s step-daddy-ism was definitely contagious.

⭐Anthothorax (T): garsantos angsty hanahaki au but with a happy ending, I promise

Psychosomatic, was another word, like idiopathic, words doctors used to excuse their own stupidity whilst patients suffered. It wasn’t real and yet the flower continued to stare up at her, yellow and defiant. Trinity develops a disease of unrequited love

⭐Honeypot(E): fingersmith inspired au set at the turn of the century

"I seem to recall a promise to show me everything?” she teased, her warm breath, sweet with the perfume of champagne wafting up to Yolanda’s nostrils. “Carajo,” Yolanda breathed before she could stop herself, the word slipping out raw and unguarded, a small fracture in the careful polish she wore so well. Miss Santos' smile widened at that, triumphant and delighted. Fortune favours the brave, or so it is said.

🔪one shots:

⭐Trinity Santos' expert guide on how to survive a lesbian cruise(T) : the one where they're on a cruise, bonus crashtos friendship!

⭐Lucky(M): Santos character study through ramen 🤭

⭐Fighting, fucking, crying, drinking(E): my own version of the post casual conversation scene

⭐Never objective but somewhat structured(M): medical examination but make it sexy?

⭐De Golpe(T): soulmate! au- colour seeing trope

Other ships:

barantos🖥️👠👟

⭐See one, Do one(E): just sex, literally just sex

⭐Action Plan(E): part two with even less plot

emma x shamsi (emsi?)🐇🐺

⭐Constructive criticism burger(E): age gap yuri 😝

Chapter 6 and our first time jump of the story! We move forwards two months from that week of the fourth, and our day at the hospital opens with a mass causality incident. Lowkey a lot happens in this chapter, but I will focus on two cases, the first one with the intubation and the last with Henry Park.

before we delve deeper into them, I want to discuss a little why I chose to one: do an mci and two: have it be a fire. At this point, trinity and Yolanda’s relationship seems unsalvageable to Yolanda, she recognises that trinity needs to become more assured in herself, though she poses this less kindly when she berates trinity for accepting just the crumbs Yolanda offered in the previous chapter, she also recognises that she herself needs to become someone who is not an “unfeeling monster”. Anyway, they both need to do quite a lot of growth, and imo start from a fresh new beginning. The fire was meant to be symbolic in that sense, burning everything to the ground so they can rebuild slowly and better this time.

but yeah onto the cases. With the intubations we see Yolanda do in canon, anytime things get tricky (like the laryngeal fracture from s1) Yolanda wants to quickly move on to a crike (basically slash a quick hole in the neck so you can have direct access to the windpipe). My read of this is that this shows her impatience, she’s not someone willing to slow down and push through the hard bits when there’s an easier (though more violent) way out just like how she behaved with trinity. Anyway, trinity does persuade her to try again and Yolanda succeeds.

then we move on to Henry park. Yolanda is surprised to find that Trinity’s leading the resus, and she’s surprised by how much trinity has grown as a doctor. During the moments leading up to their breakup, (both in canon and in the previous chapters) Yolanda was the outwardly stoic one while trinity seemed most affected and now the roles are reversed. She’s also surprised by how much trinity doesn’t seem to need her assurances anymore and it makes her mournful. Anyway, patient ends up having compartment syndrome because one I wanted to mirror the forearm fasciotomy scene from s1 and two because it’s another way I chose to show blowing things up so we can start from the beginning again.

This chapter represents a bit of a turning point for Yolanda, a come to Jesus moment in a sense. In chapter 4, we left her off with a bit of hope about her relationship with Trinity. Yolanda thinks maybe there’s a chance, not at something serious quite yet, she hasn’t examined things that far. She comforts herself with the lie that maybe she and Trinity could just go back to casual but better this time, ignoring almost everything that has happened thus far that makes going back to casual impossible.

I mirrored this wilful blindness in the case of Palmer and the splenic rupture. I explained a little bit in the chapter but what I was going for was patient is sick with mono which can cause your spleen to become enlarged and thus increase the risk of it bursting due to trauma. Yolanda walks in and excludes anything surgical without a true investigation, in chapter 2 we hear her tell off the surgical intern, tell him to remain at the patient’s bedside and do a thorough clerking, none of which she does in this chapter.

As a result, Palmer worsens and ends up needing more invasive surgery.Yolanda unfortunately takes away from this case that her distraction- Trinity, is the reason for the failure, ignoring the fact that Trinity was the one to eventually put the strings together and without her, it might have gone unnoticed for even longer.

This failure of Yolanda’s to allow herself to see things also parallels their canon argument over Langdon. As far as we know, in canon, Yolanda knows very little about Langdon’s and Trinity’s argument on that first day, despite Trinity’s attempts to talk to her about it, it’s all “trouble” and so she doesn’t want to be involved. Just as she refuses to properly treat Palmer, she refuses to see the signs with Trinity. When she does find out from Langdon’s apology, the guilt becomes overwhelming. The same guilt she feels when confronted with Sloane, and so she retreats towards anger instead in both situations. More clearly, anger at trinity.

In this chapter, we get to meet the Garcias! But before we do, there is an emergency onboard the flight. At this point, Yolanda is desperate for a distraction, she normally escapes into her work, but without it, she has nowhere else to go but home.

My goal for this chapter was to highlight Yolanda regressing in a sense. She has now acknowledged that the relationship with Trinity was unhealthy, but she concludes instead that this was simply because of who she is rather than her actions. Her retreat home, as well as her choice last chapter to hit up her teenage situation-ship, represents a step backwards for Yolanda, which I wanted to reinforce by showing all her siblings moving on with their lives.

My choice to have the medical emergency be simple hypoglycaemia was to further drive this state of childish regression across, because as Trinity might say, comparable to the cases Yolanda as a trauma surgeon normally deals with, managing simple hypoglycaemia is a medical student question.

Apart from representing Yolanda’s character in relation to Trinity, since I was exploring Yolanda’s background, I decided to have the patient be of an immigrant Latin American background. When coming up with my headcanons for Yolanda’s character, I was inspired by AMetz’s statement that Yolanda comes from a high achieving family. I thought to myself that that might make Yolanda, who is technically a first generation immigrant, view said title as “stolen valour” to some extent. She sees herself in Jorge, her patient (who is also our first named patient, another choice I made to have Yolanda not really acknowledge the humanity of her patients aside from viewing them as patients), while at the same time, knowing that due to her class, she has immense privilege compared to him.

There’s no explicit clinical stuff in this chapter but following on from last chapter, I purposely had the cardiothoracic surgeon, Dr Ojo, asks Yolanda why she chose not to do a thoracotomy. This was to kind of reflect the fact that Yolanda’s behaviour surrounding her relationship with Trinity is very unusual for her, she’s normally quick to call it off definitively. And we see that at the end of this chapter, when she realises that what her and Trinity are doing needs to come to an end for her own good.

I did weave in some bits about the anaesthetic triad which I think would be fun to discuss because I mirrored it in the end smut scene. Just briefly to make things clearer, but to put someone to sleep for surgery, you need to make sure that 1. they are asleep, 2. they are paralysed and 3. they are not in pain. The first two are more intuitive to understand, in my opinion, but giving unconscious people pain meds is necessary because they can still feel pain and so trigger their stress response.