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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.

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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 undetected into my parents' room just to feel safe.

For years, I couldn't understand why I was so hypervigilant. Why I couldn't relax. Why I refused help even when I was dying. Now, at 54, I understand: the hospital trained me to be afraid. And I've spent my whole life carrying the bat in different forms.

This is the episode about how medical trauma creates survival strategies that both save you and destroy you. It's dark. It's vulnerable. And it's the key to understanding everything that comes after.

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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 campus to 8 a.m. classes (which she skipped), working 2-6 p.m. at a data entry job, studying in residence until late

All while her lungs were in decline.

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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 to perform invincibility is to rest when nobody's watching.

By the fourth year, the performance was cracking. She was coughing up mucus into cups. Dumping them down toilets. Her exercise tolerance is becoming nonexistent.

The masterpiece of invisibility was starting to shatter.

This episode explores the invisible reality of living with CF while appearing invincible.

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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 and Poppa came in — living within blocks, sometimes just houses between us, surrogate parents who literally held the foundation together.

Granni taught me how to bake, how to cook, how to clean, how to recycle, and how to save water for laundry. Granni had afternoon tea rituals with very specific rules: milk goes in first, always warm the teapot with boiling water before you make the pot. These weren't just tea times. They were rituals about showing up. They were about a grandmother loving her granddaughter enough to teach her something useless and beautiful.

Poppa was like the Godfather — all knowing, all powerful, this presence that commanded respect without demanding it. Every Sunday after mass, Poppa would take the entire family to Dairy Queen for sundaes. It was sacred. It held us together. Poppa was the rock that anchored everything.

My uncle was the one who teased me relentlessly, who made me laugh when nothing was funny, who treated me like just another person worth messing with instead of a sick kid to be pitied. That banter saved me.

My cousins Denise and Debbie tormented me with pranks — they convinced me a pirate lived under the bed and would grab my leg if I wasn't careful. I still have a thing about pirates under my bed. Doug was mentally challenged but could throw a ball farther than anyone I've ever seen, and I was in awe of him. I took him under my wing, and we had real adventures together.

And then there was Neil, my brother, 15 months younger, who had to live in my shadow, who had to follow me in school, who had a complicated relationship with being the healthy sibling in a family consumed with my illness. We fought. We protected each other. We would take a bullet for each other.

But none of them compared to Sleepy.

Sleepy is a brown, fuzzy dog the size of a medium-sized book who was given to me for my first sinus surgery at age five. He has droopy, cute eyes. He got an ID tag like I did when I was admitted to the hospital. He went into surgery with me. He was never not with me. He was my only true unconditional friend — the one being who never pushed crap down my throat or beat me up or demanded anything except love.

I still have him. He's 50 years old. He's my rock.

This village didn't save me through pity or martyrdom. They saved me by loving me fiercely, by teaching me to make tea the right way, by taking me for Dairy Queen sundaes, by teasing me relentlessly, by being present, and by refusing to treat a sick child like she was broken.

They made me fierce.

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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 were sick. It's a story about losing everything — your weight, your identity, your future — and thinking you were done.

And then it's a story about getting a miracle drug that was supposed to fix everything. Except it broke me in ways I never expected.

This season is the archive. This is the before. This is the 50 years I spent preparing to die, building a life I never thought I'd get to live, and learning what it means to survive when survival is supposed to kill you.

I was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis in 1976 when I was four years old. The doctors told my parents not to expect me to make it to first grade. I made it to 54. I made it to a career. I made it to a foundation that raised $340 million. I made it to having a lab named after me. I made it to marriage. I made it to climbing mountains on 40 percent lung function. I made it to being a public face of hope while privately wondering if I was going to make it to tomorrow.

And through all of that, I never knew a future was coming. Not until the drug worked.

This is the story of how I learned to hide. How I learned to perform. How I learned to be fierce. How I learned to survive. Starting with a four-year-old angry girl who had no idea that she was about to become the foundation for everything that came after.

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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 best. In this episode she walks through the full financial and emotional cost of adult learning, the disasters that preceded the 4.0, and why failure hits completely differently at fifty than it did at nineteen.

Including: the portrait of her nephew that she cannot take back. The marijuana dog poster that ended up Barney purple. And a still life that her professor described, charitably, as having "interesting use of negative space."

This is a victory lap. It's also an honest accounting. Both things are true.

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🎙️ Nicole's Notes is published every Friday on cokeontherocks.ca
✍️ Read the companion blog post: cokeontherocks.ca
📩 Connect: nicole@cokeontherocks.ca

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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 through my actual feral childhood — the games, the jobs, the unsupervised summers, the playground equipment that could legally reach Mach 10 — and making the case that all of it built something specific in us: self-sufficiency, self-regulation, conflict management, and the ability to get things done without calling a meeting about it first.

We grew up latchkey and feral. We turned out fine. Mostly.