At some point a measurement is made, and the only way you can be sure of the result is by consciously experiencing it. And until you ask your colleague, her quantum state is entangled with whatever is being measured, and with the measuring apparatus.

I don't see why it's embarrassing about physicists and other scientists using "squishy" terms about things they know (or even suspect) are there but can't explain. Magnetism was just as squishy a term until it was understood. The only difference is that consciousness seems to be exclusively a first-person experience, but that arguably makes it even more real. (You might be a brain in a vat, in which case everything you sense would be bogus, but your experience of it would still be real.)