Get Well flowers in Lexington

Lexington's hospital geography is easy to learn and worth learning before you order. The academic block sits south of downtown off South Limestone: UK Albert B. Chandler Hospital at 800 Rose Street, with Kentucky Children's Hospital inside it and the Markey Cancer Center — Kentucky's only National Cancer Institute-designated center — on the same campus, plus UK Good Samaritan a few blocks north at 310 South Limestone. Baptist Health Lexington is out on Nicholasville Road at the Beaumont end of town with one of the region's busiest birth centers. CHI Saint Joseph Hospital is off Harrodsburg Road on Saint Joseph Drive, and its sister campus, Saint Joseph East, is across town on North Eagle Creek Drive near Man o' War and Richmond Road. Fill in Cardinal Hill rehabilitation on Versailles Road, Shriners Children's on Conn Terrace by the university, Eastern State Hospital on the Coldstream campus off Newtown Pike and the two Lexington VA campuses — Cooper Drive by the university and Leestown Road on the north side — and that is the whole map. Oram Flowers on Euclid Avenue is a short run to the UK campus; Nicholasville Florist KY reaches Baptist Health and the south side easily.

Now the rule that governs this occasion: the unit decides what you are allowed to send, so ask before you order. One call to the nurses' station settles it in a sentence. Intensive care units, and transplant and bone-marrow or stem-cell floors, frequently allow no flowers and no plants at all — soil and standing water are an infection-control problem for a patient with no immune defense to spare, and UK runs a large transplant program, so this comes up here more than the size of the city would suggest. Oncology floors, including Markey, typically say no lilies and nothing strongly scented: oriental lily, stock, freesia, hyacinth, paperwhite and gardenia are the usual offenders, and potted soil is out. Kentucky Children's adds no latex balloons — standard at children's hospitals because of latex allergy — and wants a small footprint in a room already crowded with equipment and a parent's cot. Behavioral health units, Eastern State among them, generally prohibit glass. None of that rules out a good arrangement. It rules out the wrong one.

Delivery mechanics, and then the mistake almost everyone makes. No hospital here will confirm a patient's room number to a florist, so put the patient's full legal name as admitted, the hospital, and the unit or floor on the order, and expect the arrangement to pass through a central desk or a volunteer service that walks it up internally. That handoff is normal and it works; it just adds an hour to whatever the tracking says. The UK campus is the slowest approach in the city — South Limestone and Rose Street run through the middle of a university, and a home football Saturday at Kroger Field or a basketball night at Rupp Arena turns the whole corridor into a parking lot from mid-afternoon. On those days order in the morning. The mistake: most stays here are short. If the patient is going home tomorrow, send to the house instead. A get-well arrangement chasing a discharged patient is the single most common wasted delivery on this rail, and the nursing station cannot forward it.

There is also a great deal of care in this city that never involves an overnight bed, and that is where senders go wrong most often. Markey's infusion suites, the dialysis centers, day surgery, physical therapy and the clinic networks along Nicholasville, Harrodsburg and Richmond Roads run on appointments measured in hours. Nobody in an infusion chair can accept or store a vase, and most of those rooms ask for no flowers or scent at all out of consideration for the person in the next chair. For someone partway through a treatment course, the right address is their house, timed for the evening of a treatment day or the morning after. The 60-mile radius also puts the regional hospitals in range: Georgetown Community, Bluegrass Community in Versailles, Clark Regional in Winchester, Bourbon Community in Paris, Harrison Memorial in Cynthiana, Frankfort Regional, Baptist Health Richmond, Saint Joseph Berea and Mount Sterling, Ephraim McDowell in Danville and Harrodsburg, and Rockcastle Regional in Mount Vernon.