NHL Twitter Helps Track Down Seattle Fan Who Saved Canucks Staffer

NHL fans helped make New Year’s Day 2022 memorable as Vancouver Canucks equipment manager Brian “Red” Hamilton was reunited with the Seattle Kraken fan who spotted a mole on his neck back in October 2021 and warned him that it was cancer. Now cancer-free, Hamilton and the Canucks set out to find the woman with help from NHL Twitter ahead of their New Years Day game in Seattle.

During the Kraken’s home opener on October 23, 2021, a fan went to the glass and tried to get Hamilton’s attention. Remarkably, despite the noise and frenetic energy of the game, Hamilton saw the woman and the message she’d written in big bold font on her cell phone: “the mole on the back of your neck is cancer.”

On New Year's Day, Hamilton and the Canucks posted a message on social media asking for Seattle Kraken fans’ help. It wasn’t long before Hockey Twitter came through and identified University of Washington graduate Nadia Popovici as the mystery woman who saved Hamilton’s life.

Popovici, who has plans to attend medical school, had been asleep while Hockey Twitter worked its magic. She’d been working a crisis hotline on New Year’s Eve and had no idea what was happening online while she slept.

“I woke up with my mom’s phone call and she was like, ‘Nadia, you have no idea what’s going on,’” Popovici told the Seattle Times. “She sent me the statement the (Canucks) put out, and it said they were looking for me.”

Popovici volunteered in hospitals long enough to know the warning signs for melanoma, and when she spotted the suspicious mole on Hamilton’s neck in October she knew she had to warn him, just in case. “He kind of glanced at my phone and walked away and I thought maybe he’d already seen it. Maybe he’d already gotten it checked out by a doctor, it’s probably fine,” she said.

It turns out that Hamilton hadn’t seen the mole and wouldn’t have noticed it without Popovici’s serendipitous intervention. He asked his wife about it when he got home and she agreed that he needed to have it checked. From there, he showed it to the Canucks' team doctor, Dr. Jim Bovard, who removed the suspicious mole and sent it in for testing. That’s when Hamilton learned that the mole was actually a type-2 malignant melanoma. Thankfully Popovici’s message arrived in time for doctors to remove it, leaving Hamilton cancer-free.

“She extended my life,” Hamilton said in a press conference ahead of the Canucks’ New Year’s Day game against the Kraken. “I’ve got a wonderful family, I’ve got a wonderful daughter and I just think, like, she extended my life. She didn’t take me out of a burning car like the big stories but she took me out of a slow fire, and the words out of the doctor’s mouth were if I ignored that for four to five years, I wouldn’t be here.”

NHL Twitter managed to track down Popovici through a Kraken Facebook group. It wasn’t long before Hamilton and Popovici had a chance to meet before the game.

Hamilton isn’t used to being in the spotlight, but he’s grateful that he had a chance to connect with the woman who saved his life to thank her in person. “She needs to know, she’s the story, she’s the person who did this,” he said. “She needs to know her efforts were valid and bang-on.”

During the game the Canucks and the Kraken presented Popovici with a $10,000 scholarship to use toward medical school tuition as a token of gratitude for her quick-thinking act that saved a man's life.

The Canucks went on to beat the Kraken 5-2 in their first game of 2022, but there’s no question that the real winners of the day are a woman who went out of her way to pass along life-saving information and a man’s quest to find her and thank her for saving his life.