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.
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