Get Well flowers in Winston-Salem

A get-well order in Winston-Salem is often being placed by somebody who does not live here. Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, on Medical Center Boulevard in its own ZIP of 27157, is an academic referral hospital and the region's Level I trauma center, which means its beds fill with people from Surry, Stokes, Wilkes, Yadkin, Davie and Alleghany counties and from the mountains beyond them. The patient is ninety minutes from home; the family is sleeping in a hotel on Hanes Mall Boulevard or in the Ronald McDonald House on South Hawthorne Road; the friend sending flowers is in Elkin or Mount Airy or Charlotte and has never been on the campus. That is the situation these four florists solve most often. The campus itself is a set of connected towers rather than a single front door, with Brenner Children's Hospital and the Comprehensive Cancer Center inside the same complex and the Ardmore neighborhood pressed right up against it. Put the unit name in the delivery notes and the driver walks it to the correct desk. Leave the unit out and a large campus has nowhere to send a vase but a lobby.

The second system runs in parallel and gets confused with the first constantly. Novant Health Forsyth Medical Center sits at 3333 Silas Creek Parkway in 27103 with the Derrick L. Davis Cancer Center and one of the busiest maternity floors in the Piedmont; Novant Health Medical Park Hospital on South Hawthorne Road handles surgical and short-stay cases; Novant Health Kernersville Medical Center covers the eastern edge of the county; and Atrium Health's Davie Medical Center is across the Yadkin River in Bermuda Run. Because one system has a Medical Center and the other has a Medical Park, and because both have cancer centers, the single most useful thing you can do before ordering is confirm which hospital and which building. Three more addresses matter and none of them work like an inpatient floor: Old Vineyard Behavioral Health Services on Old Vineyard Road generally does not permit flowers, glass or ribbon on its units; the Kernersville VA Health Care Center is an outpatient clinic with no patient rooms at all, so a veteran's get-well flowers belong at the house; and the Kate B. Reynolds Hospice Home off Silas Creek Parkway is a hospice rather than a recovery ward, where a small plant for the room and something for the nursing staff both make sense.

What a floor will accept is mostly predictable, and it is worth knowing before you choose a design. Lilies come off the list nearly everywhere — the pollen stains linens and the scent saturates a room where somebody is already nauseated, and a nurse who has to move a bouquet into the hallway is not doing anyone a favor. Heavy fragrance in general is out: stock, hyacinth and oriental varieties belong in a living room, not four feet from a patient's pillow. Intensive care, cardiac intensive care and neonatal units typically accept no flowers at all, and pieces sent there are held at a unit desk for the family to collect. Oncology, bone-marrow and transplant floors, including the treatment side of the Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Derrick L. Davis Cancer Center, restrict fresh flowers and especially potted soil plants, because the soil is the concern for a patient whose counts are down rather than the blooms. Latex balloons are barred in most hospitals on allergy grounds while mylar is usually allowed. Brenner's pediatric floors add their own rules, particularly on the oncology and cardiac units. The design that clears all of it is small, low-fragrance, lily-free, in a vessel a nurse can lift with one hand.