Ruminations: Celebrating Heroes

"It had irregular borders and it was discoloured and fairly large."
"My mom is a huge Canucks fan, a huge Canucks fan before the Kraken."
"I'm so happy his wife encouraged him to get the mole checked out."
Nadia Popovici, 22, Vancouver Canucks fan, aspiring MD

"[She] changed my life. She extended my life. I've got a wonderful family, a wonderful daughter. She changed my life. She didn't take me out of a burning car -- like a big story -- but she took me out of a flow fire."
"I want you all to know that this isn't about me. It's about an incredible person taking the time to notice something concerning and then finding a way to point it out during the chaos of a hockey game."
"Going to great lengths to get my attention from the stands while I did my job on the Canucks bench."
"I'm happy that story's there, not for me, but for her, because the world needs to know that this woman exists, and she's a hero and we need to celebrate her and people like her."
Brian Hamilton, assistant equipment manager, Vancouver Canucks

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A young woman, a hockey fan like her mother, and out with her mother on October 23 at Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle to watch a game between the Vancouver Canucks and the Seattle Kraken teams. She was seated right behind the Canucks' bench at the Kraken's inaugural home game. And looking at him, she saw something she found disturbing, and knew she had to communicate with him. A innovative solution; Nadia Popovici wrote a note on her phone and it said she was concerned about a mole she had seen on his neck.

The note text appearing on the screen was large and it was colourful. She hoped the assistant equipment manager, busy rearranging iPads, gloves and extra skate blades between periods would look at what she wrote and take some urgency of attention to it. She and her family had lived in Vancouver before she and her mother moved to Washington. That made her a dual citizen, a young woman who had graduated in 2019 from the University of Washington with plans to go on to medical school.

The man busy on the bench below her, did see the message and it made a mental impact, but a low-key one. After all, he was busy doing his job, something that was important to him, and he was under pressure. The 47-year-old really didn't process the message for its urgency and potential problem. But once back home in Vancouver, he thought about it, and asked his wife to have a look at the mole. It looked unusual, she agreed.

Which led him three days later to speak with the team doctor, Dr.Jim Bovard, who felt that the mole appeared as though it needed to be checked. He took a biopsy and within days, the mole had been surgically removed by a specialist who verified that it was a malignant melanoma, the most dangerously lethal of all skin cancers. It hadn't yet penetrated deeply into the skin, but once it had it would present a life-threatening situation, given time and inattention.

That event spurred a search on social media asking for assistance in the Canucks' bid to track down the identity of the sharp-eyed young woman whose message had spared a young father future grief. Word spread and it didn't take long before the team was able to connect with the young woman. "It [was] a pretty surreal phone call", she said afterward. Which led to a meeting between them, and Hamilton was able to thank the young woman person-to-person.

The story didn't end there. Both teams, the Kanucks and the Kraken, raised funds amounting to a joint $10,000 gift of appreciation to help the young woman with her future medical training. She had been a volunteer helping out in an oncology ward and was familiar with the look of skin cancers, such as Hamilton's. She is preparing to enter medical school after having been accepted by several schools, not yet having decided which one.