Get Well flowers in Trenton

Ask for a street number before you ask for anything else, because this is a city whose hospital names have outlived its hospital buildings. Capital Health Regional Medical Center at 750 Brunswick Avenue is still standing and still the trauma centre, which is where an ambulance takes somebody who had no plan to be in hospital that morning. But Capital Health opened an entirely new building in 2011 at One Capital Way in Pennington, out past Route 31 in Hopewell Township, and a large share of scheduled surgery moved with it, nine miles from the Brunswick Avenue lobby. Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center did the same thing a year later: the hospital everyone here grew up calling the Princeton hospital left Witherspoon Street in 2012 and now sits at One Plainsboro Road, in a different township off Route 1. A relative who says only "Capital Health" or only "Princeton" has given you a brand and a memory rather than a destination. Two more addresses complete the map: 601 Hamilton Avenue, the hospital on the Chambersburg edge that half of Trenton will keep calling St. Francis whatever the sign now reads, and RWJUniversity Hospital Hamilton at 1 Hamilton Health Place, east of the city line off Whitehorse-Mercerville Road. Five buildings, three municipalities, and not one of them walks a delivery over to another. Street, then unit, then room — and if the family can only produce two of the three, that is your signal to send to the house instead.

Now the part the acute map leaves out, and it carries more Trenton get-well volume than people expect: the long-stay institutions, most of which are not in Trenton either. Trenton Psychiatric Hospital on Sullivan Way in West Trenton — on that ground since 1848, the first state hospital of its kind built anywhere in the country — sits in ZIP 08628, the same ZIP as Aztec Florist. Assume a psychiatric hospital screens what comes through the door in a way a medical floor does not: glass, wire, cord and long ribbon are the ordinary refusals, and the item is handed to staff rather than carried to a room, so use a plastic pot and skip the bow. Up Route 206, St. Lawrence Rehabilitation Center at 2381 Lawrenceville Road and Morris Hall beside it take the weeks-long climbs — a stroke, a hip — where a room stops being a room and becomes somebody's address for a season, which is the argument for a living plant over cut stems. Greenwood House on Walter Street in Ewing delivers from a front desk, so the wing has to be written on the order for anything to move; on a dementia wing, ask for a low shatterproof container and the studio changes the vessel without touching the design. Two further distinctions save disappointment. An infusion suite is not a bed: the Rutgers Cancer Institute site on Klockner Road in Hamilton is chairs, and a patient is there for an afternoon, so send to the house and time it for the evening. And there is no children's hospital in Mercer County — a Trenton child admitted for anything serious is most likely at CHOP in Philadelphia or the children's hospital up at New Brunswick, both outside this 18-mile grid. Our Philadelphia page covers the first, and we would rather say so than take an order we cannot land.