My relative was transferred up to Kendall or downtown Miami. Can you still send flowers?
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Yes. The ring reaches sixty miles, which covers Baptist Hospital of Miami and the Miami Cancer Institute on North Kendall Drive, South Miami Hospital on SW 73rd Street, Jackson South Medical Center on SW 152nd Street, Nicklaus Children's Hospital, and the downtown medical blocks — Jackson Memorial with the Ryder Trauma Center, Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, Bascom Palmer Eye Institute and the Miami VA on NW 16th Street. What changes is the clock: downtown is roughly thirty-five miles and an hour of Turnpike from here, worse after mid-afternoon. Name the hospital explicitly in the order, because we will otherwise route to Homestead, and order in the morning.
Does the unit the patient is on change what you send?
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Yes, and now and then it cancels the order. Cancer and transplant wards turn back lilies and anything heavily scented, and they usually turn back soil-grown planters too, because the dirt rather than the greenery is what worries them when a patient's defenses are down. Critical care, coronary care, the burn unit and newborn intensive care frequently accept nothing whatsoever. Locked behavioral-health wards bar glass. Pediatric floors will not take latex balloons. Name the unit and the studio builds to it; name nothing and we default to the cautious version — no lilies, little pollen, no perfume, and a squat vase that fits a rolling tray.
Would a plant be a better gift than cut flowers?
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For a home recovery in Homestead, absolutely — a foliage plant handles this climate better than cut flowers do and is still alive months after a bouquet would have gone. For a hospital room, usually not. The dirt in a planter is exactly what a cancer or transplant ward will not have in the room, which makes the longer-lived gift the one likeliest to be turned back at reception. Cut stems in a watertight, low vase raise no such question. A practical compromise for a Homestead patient: cut flowers to the room now, and the Delightful Dieffenbachia or Amazing Arboricola to the house for the week they come home.
Someone was hurt at work in the groves or the packing houses. Where do they end up?
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Almost always Homestead Hospital first, since it is the emergency department for the whole agricultural belt from Princeton down to Florida City. Summer brings heat illness out of the fields; the packing and nursery season brings hand, back and ladder injuries; and the Turnpike extension and Krome Avenue produce the crashes. Anything beyond that campus's scope moves north to Kendall or downtown. For a crew or an employer sending flowers, the useful detail is the name the hospital admitted them under rather than the name the crew uses, plus a Spanish or Creole card message if that is the household language — both are ordinary here.
Can you deliver to a house in Homestead after a discharge?
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Yes, and after a stay up in Kendall or downtown it is often the better order anyway. What we need depends on the ZIP. Keys Gate and Malibu Bay want the guarded entrance, the callbox name and the unit, not just a street address. Leisure City, Naranja and Princeton blocks want the apartment or the trailer lot number, which is what functions as an address over much of that stretch. Out in the Redland the driver needs a phone number, the nearest cross road and a word about the dirt track. In all cases, name a shaded spot: a recovery bouquet on an open stoop in August does not last the afternoon.
What about a patient in the Keys, or a Keys family coming north?
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Both come up here because of where Homestead sits. Heading south, Mariners Hospital in Tavernier is the first hospital past the mainland and Fishermen's Community Hospital in Marathon is further down the chain; heading north, a Keys patient who needs more than the islands can provide is brought up past Homestead toward Kendall or downtown Miami. Families driving up from Key Largo or Islamorada for a hospital stay often want the arrangement sent to their room in Homestead or Florida City instead of to a patient floor, which needs the hotel, the name on the reservation and the night they arrive. Tell us which end of the chain you mean.
What happens if the hospital turns the arrangement away?
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It happens, most often on critical care, newborn intensive care, burn, transplant and locked behavioral-health units, sometimes because the patient was discharged between your order and the delivery, and in hurricane season occasionally because a named-storm watch has put the campus into pre-storm posture with outside deliveries stopped. The safeguard is free: name a backup destination in the notes — the patient's own house, or whichever relative's Homestead address the family is using as a base — and add a phone number for the person handling things on the ground. Given somewhere else to take it, the driver finishes the run that afternoon instead of hauling the arrangement back down a thirty-five mile highway.