Vancouver Canucks assistant equipment manager Brian ‘Red’ Hamilton finds woman who saved his life with message about cancerous mole

Brian “Red” Hamilton owes his life to the kindness of a stranger.

The Vancouver Canucks assistant equipment manager was in Seattle on Oct. 23 for the Kraken’s first home game when he noticed a fan banging on the glass to get his attention. It’s a common occurrence, and one Hamilton — now nearly two decades in with the Canucks — might have just ignored.

But the woman was persistent, and as Hamilton was shuffling supplies and leaving the bench, he saw the woman’s phone with a message written in large, colorful font:

“The mole on the back of your neck is cancer.”

Turns out, she was right. Hamilton had the mole biopsied and found it was a malignant melanoma in phase 2, meaning the cancer was only on the outer layer of his skin and hadn’t yet penetrated to the inner layer. That discovery was all due to early detection by the woman now identified as Nadia Popovici, whom Hamilton will forever call his hero.

“She extended my life, she saved my life,” Hamilton said Saturday. “She didn’t take me out of a burning car like [in] the big stories, but she took me out of a slow fire. The words out of the doctor’s mouth were if I ignored that for four to five years, I wouldn’t be here. I didn’t [even] know [the mole] was there. She pointed it out. How she saw it boggles my mind. It wasn’t very big. I wear a jacket [on the bench], I wear a radio on the back of my jacket that hooks on, so the cords are there. Like, she’s a hero.”

The search for Popovici began earlier Saturday when the Canucks sent out a tweet with Hamilton’s story. In that note, Hamilton wrote he wanted to thank the woman who determinedly alerted him to a potential health crisis.

“The message you showed me on your cell phone will forever be etched into my brain and has made a true life-changing difference to me and my family,” the tweet said. “Your instincts were right, and that mole on the back of my neck was a malignant melanoma and thanks to your persistence and the quick work of our doctors, it is now gone. … We…