Respite care: when someone else needs to take over
You have probably not had an unbroken night in a long time. You may have stopped going to things, stopped calling people back, stopped noticing that you have stopped. Asking for a break is not a sign that you have run out of love for your husband. It is a sign that you have been doing a job that was never designed for one person.
Respite means somebody else takes it for a stretch, so that you can sleep, or go to your daughter's wedding, or have the surgery you have been putting off, or simply sit somewhere quiet for an afternoon. Gianna HomeCare exists for exactly this: someone comes to your house and does what you have been doing, for four hours at a minimum and up to 24 hours a day.
Respite in your own house
The simplest version is that a caregiver comes to you. Nothing has to be packed, nothing has to be explained to your husband about where he is going, and his chair and his bathroom and his view out the window all stay where they are. That matters more in dementia than it does for anyone else, because familiar surroundings are doing part of the work of holding him steady.
Visits are billed by the hour with a four-hour minimum, and can run from four hours up to a full 24. The rate is on our in-home care page. A stretch of consecutive days is a scheduling question rather than a policy one, so the practical step is to call with your dates.
A short stay in one of the houses
Some families would rather their person went somewhere staffed than have a stranger in the house. Gianna Homes has two residential memory care homes, Sursum Corda in Minnetonka and Gladys' Place in Plymouth.
Whether a short stay is possible in either house, and on what terms, is not something we are going to answer off a page. Call Cari Doucette on 952-443-6113 and ask her. It is a better question to ask a few months before you need it than during the week you do.
Making the break an actual break
Write things down before you go, in more detail than feels necessary. How he takes his coffee. The name he answers to now, which may not be the one on his chart. What the afternoon looks like when it is going badly and what has worked. Which words set him off. Who he thinks you are on a bad day, and whether it upsets him to be corrected.
If you can, have the caregiver come once or twice while you are still in the house. Then leave for a short stretch before you leave for a long one. A first respite that begins with two weeks and no rehearsal is hard on both of you, and it is often the reason a family concludes that respite does not work for them, when what did not work was the plan.
You are not handing him over
Most people who arrange respite spend some of it feeling guilty and the rest of it asleep. It passes. Nothing about taking a break is a step toward giving up, and families who use respite regularly are frequently the ones who manage to keep someone at home the longest.
If you get to the end of the break and find you cannot face going back to how it was, that is worth saying out loud to someone rather than carrying quietly for another six months. Cari has had that conversation many times and it does not shock her.