My Mimosa Glass is Half Full

So after the emails to my cousin to figure out if my mother's CPAP machine was hers or a rental, after the phone calls to my brother's girlfriend trying to surmise where the CPAP masks might be, after the phone calls to the east coast medical provider to hunt down my mother's sleep study, after that sleep study was dug out of file storage and made it to the west coast medical supply firm and was lost--then found again, after a dozen of hours of frustration trying to get the CPAP to work, and after four visits from two respiratory therapists who provided two different styles of mask.........the night before last my mother managed to sleep with the CPAP for the first time since her lung surgery almost four years ago. It was eerily quiet when she went to bed. I sat on the couch in the dark petting the ancient cat, waiting. Waiting for yells or curses or for her tiny figure in her pink flannel pajamas to appear in the hallway signaling another night of frustration. But, no. Nothing. I finally gave up and went to bed myself.

In the morning I considered how to phrase the question: "So, how did it go last night?" No, no, no I told myself. That's way too general to yield a cogent answer. "How did the CPAP work last night?" Still too general. The answer could be that it was noisy or that  the machine has always worked just fine--and then a beat later, after I had already squealed a mental victory whoop, she would tell me that the mask leaked again. So I narrowed my question to the most vexing and recent of our problems with the CPAP: "Did your mask leak?" I asked. She told me it didn't. That she'd slept all night with the mask on without a leak. BUT she still had to get up and rub her sore foot, she said. And she still had to get up twice to pee. She didn't seem to be feeling the least bit celebratory. But, dear readers, if I'd had a bottle of champagne, I'd have downed a mimosa before yoga.