Get Well flowers in Covington

A Covington get-well order usually does not cross the river, and that is unusual for a city sitting this close to a bigger one. St. Elizabeth Healthcare is headquartered four miles from Madison Avenue, and its flagship — St. Elizabeth Edgewood, 1 Medical Village Drive in 41017 — is where most Covington surgery, most Covington babies and most Covington cardiac work happen, along with the St. Elizabeth Heart and Vascular Institute and the system's Cancer Center on the same Edgewood campus. The Covington campus at 1500 James Simpson Jr. Way is the in-city site, carrying the emergency department and the system's inpatient behavioral health beds. St. Elizabeth Fort Thomas at 85 North Grand Avenue takes the eastern river cities, and St. Elizabeth Florence at 4900 Houston Road takes Boone County. What crosses the bridge is the serious case: the region's Level I adult trauma centre is UC Medical Center at 234 Goodman Street in Ohio, so a bad wreck on I-75 through Covington ends up in Corryville rather than Edgewood. Children go north too, to Cincinnati Children's at 3333 Burnet Avenue. That split is the single most useful thing to know before you order — it decides which bench gets the job and how far the driver goes.

The rules on the floor decide whether a delivery reaches the bedside or stops at the desk, and they are not the same from one building to another. Lilies are the first thing to leave out. The St. Elizabeth Cancer Center in Edgewood and the oncology and blood-cancer floors across the river turn away heavy-pollen material as a matter of routine, and a bouquet that has to be rebuilt in a corridor is a bouquet that arrives late. Fragrance is the second. Cardiac step-down at Edgewood, post-surgical floors and intensive care put two patients within a few feet of each other and a staff nurse beside them all shift, so a scented arrangement is a problem for three people rather than one. Latex is a hard stop at Cincinnati Children's — the pediatric units there do not take balloon add-ons at all, so if the recipient is a child in Avondale, the answer is flowers or a plant and nothing inflated. And some beds take no fresh flowers or live plants whatsoever: transplant and bone-marrow rooms, certain intensive-care and neonatal beds, where soil and standing water carry organisms the patient cannot fight. In those cases the arrangement goes to the family waiting area or the unit desk for a relative to collect.

The practical instruction for every hospital order in this market is the same: put the unit or floor in the delivery notes, not just the hospital name. "St. Elizabeth Edgewood" is a campus; a studio building for the Cancer Center makes different choices than one building for a maternity room, and the driver needs to know which entrance to use. Behavioral health is the clearest example — the Covington campus on James Simpson Jr. Way keeps those beds, and glass vases, wire, ribbon and hard plastic generally do not go through that door. If that is where the recipient is, call the unit before you order, or send to the home address and let the family take it in on the day of discharge. Two more Covington specifics. Visiting hours are shrinking again across the region, and a delivery that lands after the doors close sits at a desk overnight; a morning window is always the better bet. And the Uptown Cincinnati cluster — UC Medical Center, Cincinnati Children's, The Christ Hospital at 2139 Auburn Avenue, Good Samaritan at 375 Dixmyth Avenue and the Cincinnati VA on Vine Street, which serves Northern Kentucky's veterans — has some of the worst parking in the metro, so those runs are dispatched early rather than squeezed in at the end of the day.