Assistant equipment manager Brian “Red” Hamilton was moving equipment on the Vancouver Canucks’ bench on October 23 in Seattle. He noticed a woman behind the bench pressing her phone against the plexiglass. A message in a large font caught Hamilton’s attention. The message expressed Nadia Popovici’s concern: She believed a mole on Hamilton’s neck was cancerous.
She was right.
“I felt bad at the moment because I’m walking off the bench and she put her phone up to the glass, and on the phone it said ‘the mole on the back of your neck is cancer.’ And it threw me off,” Hamilton recalls. “So I kind of just shrugged and kept going. My initial response when I found out was I felt bad because I felt like I didn’t really give her the time of day. I’m excited that she knows because she needs to know.”
Popovici could have looked the other way. She could have ignored her intuition. After all, banging on the glass to give someone negative news can’t have been comfortable. But her action displayed the sentiment of Mark 12:31 when Jesus admonishes, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
The game in Seattle in October was the final stop on the Canucks’ opening road trip. Within a couple days of being back in Vancouver, Hamilton had team doctors look at the mole. They expressed concern, and Hamilton had it removed a few days later and sent off for a biopsy.
The results showed cancerous cells in the mole. Doctors then removed a larger area of skin around the mole.
Happily, results for that area came back negative. But Hamilton’s doctors say the cancer in the mole could have become life-threatening in a few years had it not been addressed.
“It was only on the outer layer of my skin,” Hamilton says. “It hadn’t penetrated to the second layer of my skin and that’s because we caught it so early.”
The Canucks posted a letter from Hamilton last week. It told the story of what happened and expressed his thanks and desire to meet the woman who alerted him. Within barely an hour, both the Canucks and Seattle Kraken say Popovici had been contacted. The pair were able to meet about 90 minutes before the Kraken and Canucks played on Saturday night.
Popvici says she appreciates “the fact that I got to look him in the eye and hear what happened from his perspective.” The 22-year-old graduated from the University of Washington. She plans to attend medical school next year.
The Kraken related Hamilton and Popvici’s story midway through the first period. The crowd gave a standing ovation. Then the two franchises announced they would give Popovici a joint gift of $10,000 to help with her medical school expenses.
Hamilton has been with the Canucks for nearly 20 years. With the chaos of an NHL game, Hamilton was amazed Popovici was able to notice a mole he had no idea existed.
“How she saw it boggles my mind,” Hamilton says. “It wasn’t very big. I wear a jacket. I wear a radio on the back of my jacket that hooks on so the cords are there.”
Popovici has done a lot of volunteer work in hospitals, including a stint helping in an cancer ward. “I saw his and I was like, wow, that is a picture-perfect example of what a melanoma looks like,” she says.
Hamilton says the purpose of telling his story is to give Popovici recognition for her effort in getting his attention and writing the message.
“She’s the story,” Hamilton says. “She’s the person that did this. She saved the life. . . . She needs to know her efforts were valid and bang on.”
(Seattle Kraken fan Nadia Popovici poses for a photo before an NHL hockey game between the Kraken and the Vancouver Canucks on January 1, 2022, in Seattle. Popovici shows the text of a message she showed to Brian “Red” Hamilton during an October hockey game. AP/Ted S. Warren)
