Get Well flowers in San Rafael

This town was founded as a convalescent station, which is a strange thing to be able to say about a get-well page and entirely true here. Mission San Rafael Arcángel, established in 1817 and standing today at 1104 Fifth Avenue, began as an outpost where converts who were sickening in the damp and fog at Mission Dolores could be moved into the warmer, sheltered, markedly drier air on this side of the bay. It was named for Raphael, the archangel associated with healing. The microclimate that motivated the whole thing is still the defining fact of San Rafael: tucked behind the ridge, it is sunnier and considerably warmer than Sausalito or Mill Valley, and its hottest weeks are September and October rather than midsummer. That matters more to a get-well delivery than any winter storm does, and the practical consequence appears at the end of this page. Two hundred years on, the beds are at Kaiser Permanente San Rafael, 99 Montecillo Road in 94903, at MarinHealth Medical Center on Bon Air Road in Greenbrae, and at Kentfield Hospital on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard — and the benches that serve them are four.

An inversion that shapes ordering in Marin, and that out-of-town senders almost always get wrong. In most cities the hospital pulls patients in from the region. Here it frequently pushes them out: Marin runs a modest hospital footprint, so anything requiring a transplant programme, a major trauma centre, advanced neonatal or paediatric intensive care, or a specialised cancer protocol generally goes across the Golden Gate. That means the patient can be lying on Parnassus Avenue, on Van Ness, on Potrero Avenue or over at Mission Bay in San Francisco while the family who need the flowers are still in a house in Santa Venetia, and the visiting spouse is making a two-bridge or one-bridge round trip every day for a fortnight. Before you choose an address, ask two questions: where is the patient, and who is having the harder week. Frequently the correct delivery is not the hospital room at all but the kitchen of the person doing the driving. All the San Francisco campuses are inside this 60-mile radius, as is Kaiser Richmond on Nevin Avenue, which is the closest hospital to San Rafael by distance and the furthest by feel, because getting there means the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge.

The Marin beds, in the order our benches reach them. Kaiser Permanente San Rafael at 99 Montecillo Road sits up off the Los Ranchitos and Nova Albion side of 94903, and the hospital building is not the same address as the medical-office buildings around it, so a delivery needs the building as well as the room — a runner sent to the wrong one loses twenty minutes to a parking structure. MarinHealth Medical Center, the county's largest hospital, is off Sir Francis Drake at Bon Air Road in Greenbrae, beside the Bon Air shopping centre with Corte Madera Creek behind it; the newer patient pavilion and the older wings have different lobbies and the surgical and oncology floors are reached differently, which is why we ask for the unit name rather than the department. Kentfield Hospital on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard is the one that deserves a paragraph of its own: it is a long-term acute-care campus, where stays run to weeks rather than nights, ventilator weaning and complex wound recovery among them. Flowers do more work there than anywhere else in this radius, because the room becomes someone's address and a bare windowsill in week three is bleak. Novato Community Hospital on Rowland Way is the north-county bed and is closer to both Novato benches than San Rafael is. Outpatient care concentrates at Kaiser's Montecillo buildings and at the county's Health and Wellness Campus on Kerner Boulevard in the Canal.

Four refusals account for very nearly everything handed back at a nurses' station, and each of them has a reason worth knowing. Lilies come first. One brush of a sleeve puts pollen on a gown or a white sheet and it does not come out; the scent reaches the people least able to get up and walk away from it; and since most of these arrangements eventually travel home, a household cat turns a gift into an emergency. Height comes second: the rolling table the piece has to live on is already holding a jug, a handset, a call button and, at midday, a meal tray, so what fits is low, wide at the base and not made of glass. Fragrance is third, policed most strictly wherever a patient cannot step into a corridor for air — intensive care, the post-surgical wards, any room on an infusion. Latex balloons are fourth and the one nobody anticipates: refused on allergy grounds across every campus inside this radius, so a balloon tied to the wrap is surrendered at reception while the flowers go up without it. Mylar is allowed. The stems that hold in a warm room and survive being carried down three corridors are carnations, stock, alstroemeria, hardy chrysanthemum, lisianthus, gerbera and solidago. And send the unit name with the room number: no information desk in California may confirm a patient's presence to a courier if that patient has asked not to be listed, which is exactly why the request exists.