San Leandro is a small city with a strangely spread-out medical map, and the spread is vertical. Kaiser Permanente San Leandro Medical Center sits out in the flats on Merced Street, west of the freeway among the warehouses and food plants — it opened in 2014 as the replacement for Kaiser's old Hayward hospital, and for a large share of this city's families it is simply where you go. San Leandro Hospital, run by Alameda Health System, sits two and a half miles inland at 13855 East 14th Street, right on the city's main street where the bus lines already go. And the Fairmont campus, also Alameda Health System, sits higher again on Foothill Boulevard above the Bal and Halcyon neighborhoods, with the county's John George Psychiatric Pavilion on Fairmont Drive beside it. Three hospitals, three roads, three different drives, and no single approach that serves all of them — the Merced Street run crosses I-880, the East 14th run is stoplight after stoplight, and the Foothill run climbs. That geography is the reason we ask which hospital and which unit rather than assuming, and the reason a get-well order placed at noon for the hill campus is tighter than it looks on a map.
Before you choose flowers, make one phone call to the nurse station. It is not a formality, and in this county the answers genuinely vary by unit within the same building. Intensive care and some treatment units do not accept flowers at all. Others accept them but refuse anything with heavy pollen or strong scent, because a shared room with two patients and a closed door concentrates fragrance in a way a living room never does. Vases are frequently a problem where glass is not allowed on a floor. And at John George on Fairmont Drive, a psychiatric facility, deliveries of flowers are generally not accepted — the correct gesture there is a card sent through the family, not a bouquet a driver will be turned away with. Once you have an answer, tell us: we will build low-pollen, hold the lilies, swap glass for a ceramic or a basket, and keep the arrangement small enough to share a tray table with a water pitcher and a phone. If the unit will not take flowers at all, send to the family's house instead. The person holding vigil in a waiting room is usually the one who needs the delivery more anyway.