Get Well flowers in Palisades Park

The first thing to settle is which building. There is no hospital inside Palisades Park — a square-mile-and-a-quarter borough does not carry one — so every get-well order placed from 07650 leaves town, and the direction it leaves in changes both the delivery and the rules at the other end. Englewood Health at 350 Engle Street is the closest full-service hospital, a short run north up Broad Avenue through Leonia. Holy Name Medical Center at 718 Teaneck Road is west across the Overpeck and is where a great many families from this borough end up by choice rather than by distance: Holy Name runs a Korean Medical Program with Korean-speaking staff and interpretation, which for a patient who would rather explain a symptom in their own language is worth several miles. Hackensack University Medical Center at 30 Prospect Avenue is the big one — the John Theurer Cancer Center and the Joseph M. Sanzari Children's Hospital are both on that campus, and both are where a delivery is most likely to be refused at the desk rather than accepted. South, at the foot of the cliffs, Palisades Medical Center at 7600 River Road in North Bergen takes the Hudson County side of the borough's traffic despite the name pointing at this one. Bergen New Bridge Medical Center in Paramus covers long-term and behavioural care. And because the George Washington Bridge is minutes from the top of Broad Avenue, a real share of this borough's serious cases go to NewYork-Presbyterian at 622 West 168th Street, with Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital at 3959 Broadway and the Allen at 5141 Broadway on the same avenue.

The second thing to settle is whether flowers are allowed where the patient is. This is not a formality and it is not uniform: the answer varies by floor, sometimes by wing, and it can change between the day you ask and the day you send. Inpatient oncology at the John Theurer Cancer Center is the likeliest refusal in this radius, and a paediatric room at Sanzari is not far behind; intensive care almost anywhere on this list will hold the delivery at the nurses' station rather than let it into the room. Two minutes on the phone to the unit — not the main switchboard, the unit — gets you a clean yes or no, and if the answer is no you have two good alternatives that both beat a wasted trip. Send it to the house they are being discharged to, where it will do more good in a fortnight than a vase on a hospital sill does in three days. Or send something that is not flowers at all to the family member holding the room down, which in this borough is frequently a daughter or daughter-in-law who has been there since six in the morning. Whichever you choose, put the full patient name and the room or unit on the order, and add a mobile number: hospital reception will not chase a partial name, and the driver will not be allowed past the lobby to ask.

Two footnotes worth having before you order. The first is the happy version of this occasion: a new baby is a get-well order in everything but name, and the maternity floors at Englewood Health and at Hackensack University Medical Center are the two this borough uses most. Those wards are far more relaxed about deliveries than the units above them, but they have their own timing — a room changes hands quickly, and an arrangement that arrives after discharge follows the family home only if somebody at the desk knows where home is. Send it to the house on day two instead of the ward on day one and it will still be alive when the visitors start. The second footnote is for the Bronx: if the patient has been sent to the medical cluster around Morris Park Avenue and Pelham Parkway — Jacobi Medical Center, Montefiore Einstein, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine campus — then Ny Floral Express at 726 Morris Park Avenue is standing in the middle of it, and an order entered against the hospital's address rather than yours will land there rather than being driven across a bridge from New Jersey. The same is true in reverse for anyone sending into 07650 from New York.