By Steve Keating
(Reuters) – The assistant equipment manager for the Vancouver Canucks took to social media on Saturday to find the Seattle Kraken fan he said saved his life by spotting a cancerous mole on the back of his neck.
Brian Hamilton, who was unaware of the mole, was going about his usual business during a National Hockey League game in Seattle on Oct. 23 when a woman sitting in a seat behind the visiting team bench kept trying to get his attention.
The persistent woman finally typed a message into her mobile photo and held it up for Hamilton, warning him, “The mole on the back of your neck is cancer.”
After returning to Vancouver, Hamilton had the mole biopsied. It was diagnosed as a malignant melanoma.
“I am trying to find a very special person and I need the hockey community’s help,” Hamilton wrote in a letter posted on the Canucks Twitter account. “To this woman I am trying to find, you changed my life, and now I want to find you to say THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH.
“Problem is, I don’t know who you are and where you are from.”
The heroine was quickly identified as Nadia Popovici.
Yukyung Nelson, a member of the Ladies of the Kraken Facebook group saw the Canucks tweet and realized the mystery woman was her daughter
“Oh my gosh!!! This was my daughter!!!”, Nelson wrote in a response to the tweet. “She just got accepted to multiple medical schools.
“We have season tickets behind the opposing team and she noticed the mole on the back of his neck so she typed a message on her phone and knocked on the glass window to get his attention.”
The Canucks confirmed on their official Twitter account, “Thank you all we have found her”.
“She extended my life, she saved my life,” Hamilton said in an interview on Zoom. “She didn’t take me out of a burning car like the big stories, but she took me out of a slow fire.
“How she saw it boggles my mind. It wasn’t very big.
“Like, she’s a hero.
“She was so persistent, and I just want her to know that her persistence was what saved my life.”
(Reporting by Steve Keating in Toronto; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
