Policy next, building by building, since what matters is whatever a given floor turns away at the door. Yankee Road is the strictest address in range. A pediatric campus adds one rule the adult hospitals do not: latex is out, which makes the balloon tied to the handle the commonest reason a delivery gets held downstairs. Shedding stems are out too, and where a child's immune system is under treatment a pot of living soil is not a gift but a culture medium a foot from the pillow of a patient whose white-cell count everybody watches. Liberty does not hold the region's highest level of newborn intensive care; Burnet Avenue does. A Hamilton family with a baby in intensive care is therefore almost certainly twenty-five miles south, on a unit that accepts nothing at all; the delivery that helps goes to the empty Hamilton house, or to the grandparents in Lindenwald minding the other children. Cancer care is the next tier. Oncology and infusion patients at Kettering Health Hamilton, Mercy Fairfield, UC West Chester and Atrium are the ones whose units refuse lilies: the anthers open a day in and drop rust-coloured dust on a pillowcase somebody on shift has to strip. Scent goes for a reason just as ordinary — a room on the Eaton Avenue surgical floor holds two beds, and whatever you pick lands on the stranger in the other one. Intensive care, burn and step-down normally decline outright; a lobby handoff to a relative is the way in. Post-surgical and maternity floors take most of these orders and are easy by comparison.
Two things sink these orders, and neither is the flowers. The first is what the card says. A courier at an information desk can only hand over what the desk can match: the name admitting typed, and a unit. "Dave, second floor" is not an address on a campus with several inpatient floors, and if the patient asked to stay out of the facility directory (ordinary after a wreck on 129) the clerk may not say whether that person is a patient there. Get three items: campus, unit, room. Two plus a mobile number still works, since the run can be redirected. The second is the calendar. Stays here are short, and an arrangement arriving on discharge morning goes home on its side. Ask when the discharge conversation is happening; if the answer is tomorrow, skip Eaton Avenue and have something waiting at the house a day later, once the visiting has stopped and the sofa-bound half of recovery begins. Home delivery here has one real obstacle, the housing stock: the subdivided houses on Dayton Lane and through Rossville put a post-surgical patient above a porch flight and a second staircase, and from December to March an unheated porch finishes a plant in an afternoon. Leave a phone number, say which floor, ask for the knock.