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 from 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 have been a part of a 350 million dollar fundraising campaign and had a 50' banner of my mug hanging off the Foothills Hospital for 4 years from 2003-2007.
Currently finishing two programs at the University of Calgary, one in Graphic Design (graduating June 15, 2026) and the other in Integrated Digital Media (graduating May 2027), my friends would consider me the Sassy Smurf out of the group.
I may have been given a cactus, but I don't have to sit on it.
NiCole's Notes
Just Me. Choosing Me. Ep. 3 of 3
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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 before she died versus the slower, harder work of deciding what she actually stands for — and lands on the thing that Trikafta made possible and terrifying in equal measure: a future. An actual future. And the profound responsibility that comes with it.
This is the finale of the 3-episode arc: God, Guts & the Physics of Survival. It ends with a manifesto. It ends with a choice. It ends, as Nicole always does- fierce.
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