Goose Creek does not have a hospital. That sounds like a small piece of trivia and it is actually the whole shape of this page, because it means there is no default address — you have to know which building, and the buildings are nothing like each other. The practical nearest is Trident Medical Center, on Medical Plaza Drive off Rivers Avenue in North Charleston, a straight run down US-52 from 29445 and where most Goose Creek admissions land. Northwest of the city, Summerville Medical Center and Roper St. Francis Berkeley, up in the Cane Bay end of Berkeley County, take the households nearer Carnes Crossroads and the 29486 line. Then there is the peninsula, twenty-odd miles south and a completely different kind of delivery: the MUSC campus with the university hospital on Ashley Avenue, Ashley River Tower on Courtenay Drive, MUSC Shawn Jenkins Children's Hospital on McClennan Banks Drive and Hollings Cancer Center on Jonathan Lucas Street, plus Roper Hospital on Calhoun Street, Bon Secours St. Francis on Henry Tecklenburg Drive over in West Ashley, and the veterans' hospital on Bee Street. Different wings, different entrances, different rules about what is allowed upstairs. The order therefore needs the building name and the room number, and if you only have one of the two, ring the shop before you order rather than after.
Before you order anything, though, answer two questions, because they decide more outcomes than the arrangement does. Is the person actually admitted, and are they still going to be there tomorrow? A great many get-well orders from out of state arrive for a patient who went home at eleven in the morning — and a hospital does not forward flowers. Same-day surgery at any of these buildings means the person is recovering on their own sofa in Crowfield or Devon Forest by the afternoon, which makes the house the correct address, not the bed. This is true here more than in most cities for a specific reason: Goose Creek's working population is shift-based, in the plants and terminals and on the base, and people schedule procedures around a rotation and get back to their own house as fast as they can. Does the unit take flowers at all? Some do not. Units treating patients whose immune systems are suppressed — the transplant and cancer floors at Hollings among them — do not accept cut stems or potted plants, and neither do most intensive-care rooms in any of these hospitals. The rule is not uniform, it is set by the unit and not by the hospital, and the only reliable way to know is to ask the nurses' station or ask us to ask. When the answer is no, send to the waiting family instead, or to the house for when the patient gets there.