Nicole Malachowski
speaker
750 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard 18 Sep
Nicole Malachowski’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There wasn't a day that went by that the first lady, then Michelle Obama, wasn't asking and inquiring what needs to be done. Where are the challenges? Where can we take away bottlenecks? Where can we put the power and the prestige of the White House behind to influence good behavior in the veteran hiring space? I mean, it happened every single day.
The only thing I hear coming out of the White House nowadays is we're removing people's stories. I mean, it was to the point that there was a friend of mine outside of Phoenix, Arizona. They were having their annual veterans kind of event, honoring women veterans. And they asked the local base, as they had done for decades. And keep in mind, local electric officials were there. This was the mayor.
This was the full thing. They'd been doing this for decades. They wrote to the local base and said, hey, can you please send out, as you always do, you know, your national anthem singer. We would love to have a military person in uniform sing the national anthem, as we do through public affairs. They were turned down and told, we're really sorry. We know we've done this for decades.
We can no longer do it because your event says women veterans and we're not allowed to do that due to the new DEI. I mean, that happened.
I mean, and that impacts recruitment and retention. If people look at the VA and go, we're not going to get what was promised to us when we rose, you know, raised our hand to the Constitution. You know, that was a compact between us and the American people.
When we decided to put on our nation uniform and now we're not getting, you know, that whatever the end part of the contract back, they're not honoring their part of it. That's a recruitment and retention issue also.
So I guess part of my story, that's a big part of my story, is my career came to an end very unexpectedly, very abruptly and very much overnight when I was serving in the White House that second time in the Joining Forces role. I fell severely ill like overnight. I won't get into all the details here. We could probably do a whole nother podcast on that.
But long story short, I ended up with a major brain infection. It left me bedridden for nine months. Couldn't walk, talk, read or write. And then I had to do another year and a half in rehab in order to get back to the quality of life and function that you see today. So I lost two years of my life. During that time, I went through a medical evaluation board and I was
medically retired from the career I loved so much. It still hurts. But at the end of the day, this might surprise the listeners. I was medically retired. And in fact, because I was coming on here, I pulled this up to look at it because I hadn't seen it in a while. So forgive me, got to put on my, this is how you know you're a Fulford Colonel, right?
You got the readers. That's right. That's how 06s go to meetings, right?
I know, I need to get those. My Air Force Form 356, dated 21 July 2017, found 100% quote, unfit for duty due to chronic systemic tick-borne illness. So a tick bite is what ended my career. You know, I went from this really kind of elite, high-performing, physically fit, mentally fit, spiritually fit person to just completely broken overnight. And at the end of the day, my career was gone.
And I sat there thinking, who am I if I'm not wearing my nation's uniform? What is my contribution to society if I'm not a fighter pilot? And how am I going to provide for my family? And it was in those deep and dark moments of 2017 that I really had to think about how am I going to reinvent myself? And so Long answer to your short question, Krusty.
People always say, I'm so sorry you can't fly anymore because I still have a lot of brain damage and a lot of stuff that impacts my balance and all of that. I always tell them it's not the flying that I miss. It's being a part of high-performing teams. It's about leadership and it's about teamwork. And so I reinvented myself kind of as a leadership consultant and a professional speaker.
So I work with Corporate America to try to hone elite team performance for them, to build teamwork, to build trust, and I think to embrace vulnerability. And so I very selfishly fill that hole in my heart by being a part of these corporate teams kind of as I make my way around their different events.
So I didn't get full-on encephalitis. What happened was, to be very specific, the infection got into my brainstem, specifically an area at the top of the brainstem called the pons. The pons is what controls your autonomic nervous system. It's like the worst place in your brain to get an infection. So I did not advance to encephalitis, but I had infectious lesions on my brainstem.
I actually got it when I was the commander of the 333rd in North Carolina. We were doing our annual SEER training, right? So we were out there crawling around in the woods. We didn't talk about tick bite prevention. We didn't talk about tick property removal. We never were educated at that time on what symptoms to look for.
And when I presented several months later with multi-systemic problems, my flight surgeon, my military doctor looked me in the eye and he said, we don't have Lyme disease in North Carolina. And that was the day that I became chronically ill forever. May is indeed Lyme disease and tick-borne illness awareness month. So I'm glad we are bringing this up.
The most important thing friends is to prevent the bite. Permethrin and Picardin are your friends. And if people go to my, any of my social media, which is at real Malakowski, I have a link tree link. If you go to that link tree link and you scroll down, it's got everything you need to know about tick bite prevention.
Don't end up like me.
And I think education-wise, I've been very involved in the patient advocacy space and very much a pain in the butt to the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs on tick-borne illnesses since then. I think fundamentally, Krusty, there was a difference in training because Army and Marines on the ground, rooting around.
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