Almost everywhere else the family names the hospital and the order is effectively addressed. In Jacksonville the name is where the trouble starts. Baptist Health puts Baptist on five hospitals — the flagship at 800 Prudential Drive on the Southbank, Baptist South at Bartram on Old St. Augustine Road, Baptist Beaches in Jacksonville Beach, Baptist Clay on Fleming Island and Baptist Nassau up in Fernandina. Ascension St. Vincent's has two campuses in range, Riverside on Shircliff Way and Southside on Belfort Road, with the St. Johns between them. UF Health means either the trauma center on West 8th Street or the newer hospital on Max Leggett Parkway by the airport. Sending a driver to the wrong half of any of those pairs does not cost ten minutes here. It costs a bridge, and usually the cutoff. The question worth asking is never the health system; it is the building, the street, and then the unit.
Restrictions belong to units, and here they have names. The neonatal intensive care unit at Wolfson Children's takes nothing living — no stems, no pot — so a NICU family gets the delivery at home, or at the Ronald McDonald House on Children's Way, where the parents are probably sleeping a hundred yards from the incubator. That block misleads twice: Nemours Children's Health at 807 Children's Way is specialty clinics rather than beds, so an admitted child is next door in Wolfson. Cancer changes the rules another way. Baptist MD Anderson, the cancer floors at Mayo and the oncology units at UF Health treat pollen and perfume as clinical questions rather than taste: no lilies in any form, nothing bred to scent a room, and while blood counts are down several of those units keep soil out of the room altogether — the plant is right for the same patient in six weeks and wrong today. Mayo's transplant floors are tighter still, and the campus answers that itself: Gabriel House of Care, the hospitality house on Mayo's own grounds, will take a delivery for the caregiver staying there when the patient can receive nothing. At UF Health's trauma and neuro intensive care the answer is usually no, and what arrives waits at the desk for a relative.
The easy floors are maternity, orthopedics and the post-surgical wards at Memorial, St. Vincent's Southside and Baptist South, and Brooks Rehabilitation earns its own line. A rehabilitation admission runs weeks, and the patient is out of the room in the therapy gym for much of the day — which is quietly hard on cut stems, left unattended for hours with nobody near the water. That is the clearest case in this city for something in a pot. What travels onto any of these floors is low, dense and does not shed: spray roses, mini carnations, button poms, hypericum berry and salal, in a ceramic or plastic cube no taller than a foot. Leave the eucalyptus out; it is the scented thing people forget is scented. Skip the latex balloon, refused at every pediatric building in town. The free surface in a semi-private room is about the width of a paperback, so anything built upward is off the sill within the hour.