NiCole's Notes
NiCole's Notes: The study guide for adulting. Witty, rigorous analysis of everything that matters: politics, love, illness, friendship, technology, aging, and the contradictions we live with. Sarcastic scholarship for the thinking Gen-X mind. Smart when it matters and Witty always. A graduate of the University of Calgary, B.A. Political Science '95, B.A.Spanish '08, born with cystic fibrosis, a lung disease that has been trying to kill me since birth. Hanging on to life by the horns with only 26% lung function. I have 20+ years of experience building organizations and understanding how systems actually work. Founder of the Summit Foundation for Cystic Fibrosis, raising 3.5+ million dollars for local research; Philanthropist of the Year for Alberta in 2014; honoured with the naming of a research lab at the Cumming School of Medicine, Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases, at the University of Calgary in 2013. Featured in a documentary about my journey with CF and being a CrossFit athlete, while owning my own gym in 2018. I was part of a $ 350 million fundraising campaign and had a 50' banner of my mug hanging off Foothills Hospital for 4 years (2003-2007). I am deep into my journey to finding my true self. I am attempting to integrate my conscious and unconscious to allow my authentic self to emerge. See Carl Jung's theory about individuation. I write about how I am doing it on my website: www.cokeontherocks.ca, so go see me there for some tips. Just graduated with a professional certification in Graphic Design (June 15, 2026) and am working on another in Integrated Digital Media (graduating May 2027); my friends would consider me the Sassy Smurf of the group. I may have been given a cactus, but I don't have to sit on it.
Episodes
When you're living your most public life—keynoting in front of CEOs, your face on 50-foot hospital banners, raising millions for your foundation—who sees you disappearing at home?
This is the story of the duality. Of building a public persona as the inspirational CF patient while your marriage quietly dies. Of performing health and strength while your lungs decline. Oxygen is the moment when hiding became...
Episode 6: I weighed 74 pounds at my wedding. Ten years later, the University of Calgary named a research lab after me. This is how I went from surviving on a feeding tube to raising millions for CF research and discovering that my survival meant something bigger. This episode is the story of redemption. Not because I'm special. But because I refused to die on someone else's timeline.
From small wins in weight ...
46 pounds lost in 7 years. 74 lbs at wedding. Surgery 6 weeks before marriage. "You'll die without this tube." Walking down the aisle as a skeleton.
Trigger Warning: Medical trauma, childhood fear, anxiety, hypervigilance
What happens to a child's mind when doctors and nurses repeatedly invade their body and sleep without consent?
This bonus episode bridges The Exacerbation and The Feeding Tube. It's the story of what I didn't talk about in the main series: the bat under my bed, the nightly combat planning, the terror of closed eyes, and how I learned to sneak und...
This is the story of a 22-year-old who thought she was invincible. Who had survived 10 years of hiding CF. Who had proven to the world that her disease didn't define her.
And then her lungs decided to call her bluff.
The hamster wheel was brutal:
- Thursday, Friday, Saturday: out until 2-3 a.m., drinking to blackout, not eating
- Sunday: sleep all day, try to eat, try to catch up on homework
- Weekdays: slogging across cam...
This is episode 3 of 9.
At age 9, something shifted. Nicole joined the swimming team. And for the next 10 years, she became a master of performance. The world saw a varsity captain, a provincial athlete, a girl with no limitations. What they didn't see was the demon, hard and fast, every single day. How did she not collapse? A fantastic appetite. Sleeping constantly. Napping between every activity. The only way...
Your parents are 17 and 18. You're four years old. You have a terminal illness. The doctors just told them you probably won't make it to first grade.
Now what?
This is the story of what happens when a village decides that's unacceptable.
My parents were young and unprepared for parenthood, let alone parenthood of a child with cystic fibrosis. So they needed parenting, too. That's where Granni an...
Hi, I'm Nicki Zeller. Welcome to Nicole's Notes, where I try to find clear thinking about the messiest things.
I'm about to tell you a story that spans 50 years. It's a story about being told, at age four, that you probably won't make it to first grade. It's a story about a village that decided you were worth keeping alive anyway. It's a story about learning to hide a disease so well that the world forgot you...
Two degrees + Two professional certifications. Thirty-five years. A 4.0 GPA. Nicki Zeller on what changes when you pay for your own education — and a partial inventory of the worst art ever produced at the University of Calgary. Nicki Zeller graduated from the University of Calgary's Graphic Design and Integrated Digital Media program with a 4.0 GPA — her third post-secondary credential, and by far her b...
Nicole Zeller opens her private journal for the first time on the podcast. This is a four-episode Nicole's Notes series about strength, heartbreak, self-respect, and what it really costs to feel everything without running. Starts now. What happens when the thing that kept you alive starts keeping you lonely? Nicole opens the journal. Raw and uncensored.
Forget the generic Gen-X nostalgia take — this is the real one, first person, with receipts.
Ashtrays were a chore. I was babysitting a newborn at twelve for $20 a week. My brother Neil drove a truck at eleven. I was balancing a till at a bingo hall at thirteen in a room so thick with smoke it could cure a ham. And somehow, none of this was considered unusual.
In this episode of Nicole's Notes, I'm walking throu...
Nicole reads the journal entry where she stopped white-knuckling it and named what she actually needed — not rescue, but relief. Not someone stronger, but someone strong enough. The episode where self-respect stops being armour and starts being a standard.
Heartbreak doesn't always diminish you. Sometimes it expands you. Nicole reads the journal entry where she took inventory of who she was in the middle of the pain, and found a rare diamond, a meditation on expansion, self-respect, and the broken hallelujah of loving fully.
She'll handle it. She'll survive it. She'll carry it. She's strong. But nobody asked if she wanted to. Nicole reads the journal entry where she named the loneliness inside the competence, and the isolating shadow of being the one who always handles it.
Nicole reads a raw journal entry written under pressure and unpacks what it actually means to be self-aware when it comes at a cost. Real strength isn't performance. And looking at your walls? That's rare. Self-awareness isn't the destination. It's the price of admission
For most of her life, Nicole Zeller negotiated with God. Struck deals. Prayed during CF exacerbations. Promised to be better, do better, live better, if only her body would cooperate. If only she could breathe again. In this episode, she names what she's been circling for years: she doesn't believe anymore. Not in anger. In clarity.
Nicole unpacks the question she was asking wrong; why does God allow suffering? and e...
The classic argument for God is complexity: we're too intricate to be the result of accidents. But Nicole Zeller — a woman who has spent five decades inside a body that evolution built imperfectly and medicine rebuilt carefully — has a different read.
In this episode, she breaks down what evolution actually does and doesn't promise. She uses her own CFTR gene mutation as a case study in how biological tra...
So if God is out — then what? It's the question Nicole gets every time she talks about faith. And in this final episode of the arc, she answers it plainly.
Science replaces God as a method. Medicine replaces God as a practice. Determination replaces God as a source of strength. And purpose? You build that. You don't receive it.
Nicole walks through her two races — the frenzy of accomplishing everything bef...
Smart people fall for false saviours. People with advanced degrees. People who pride themselves on being rational. How is that possible? This episode explores the emotional and cognitive mechanisms that make even intelligent people vulnerable to authoritarianism, and why we can't argue our way out of it.
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