Get Well flowers in Norfolk

Then the units, named, because that is where these orders fail. At CHKD the neonatal intensive care unit takes no flowers and no plants; when the patient is a newborn, the gift that arrives is one sent to the family's own address, or handed to a parent away from the unit. CHKD's hematology and oncology patients come next: no lilies, nothing shedding pollen, no perfume, and one rule adults routinely trip over — latex balloons are out across the building, because latex allergy runs high among the children treated there. Mylar is generally fine. The Children's Pavilion adds its own layer, since behavioral units limit glass, wire, ribbon and cords; a bouquet in a glass vase is the wrong object there, while a plant in a plastic pot is the right one. On the adult side, the intensive-care and trauma floors at Sentara Norfolk General produce most of the refusals on this page — those beds turn over hard, and a lobby handoff to a named relative is the realistic route in. The Heart Hospital's transplant and advanced heart-failure beds decline potting soil outright, the objection being fungal spores in damp peat, not the blooms above it. Surgical, orthopedic and maternity floors take almost anything offered. What clears all of it: alstroemeria and lisianthus, spray roses, carnations, gerbera daisies and solidago, built dense and low in an unbreakable vessel nobody has to move when a meal tray arrives.

Norfolk's other two hospitals sit two miles apart on the same road, at opposite ends of what the word stay means. Sentara Leigh Hospital at 830 Kempsville Road in 23502 handles much of the city's scheduled surgery, its orthopedics and a large share of its births; those are the most permissive floors in Norfolk, and a bouquet sent there ordinarily goes straight up. Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital at 1309 Kempsville Road is the inverse, and the City of Norfolk owns it. Stays run to weeks and months, ventilator and rehabilitation patients live in those rooms rather than passing through, and flowers there are furniture instead of an event. It is the one address in the city where a plant is obviously the better buy — a pothos or a dracaena in a plastic pot outlasts the fourth bouquet, and the staff are accustomed to watering. Keep pollen modest on the pulmonary side anyway. One name to handle carefully: families here still say DePaul by reflex, meaning the Bon Secours campus at 150 Kingsley Lane in 23505, whose inpatient role has narrowed a good deal in recent years. Ask which building the patient is in before ordering. The same caution goes for anyone who says *the general*, or just *Sentara*, which across this metro could mean six hospitals in four cities.