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Heroes

A hockey fan spotted a tiny detail on a stranger's neck. Her quick warning saved his life.

"She extended my life. I've got a wonderful family. I've got a wonderful daughter. She saved my life."

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Nadia Popovici's life-saving message at the Kraken/Canucks game in Seattle via Twitter

Hockey fan Nadia Popovici had been watching the Vancouver Canucks play the Seattle Kraken in 2022 when she noticed something offputting from the stands that set off alarms from her training as a medical student.

As Canucks assistant equipment manager Brian Hamilton approached the bench, Popovici noticed a small mole on the back of his neck. The marking might have seemed innocent enough, but thanks to her experience volunteering for oncology wards, Popovici recognized the potential danger lurking. So, she quickly took action.

“The mole on the back of your neck is cancer,” read Popovici’s message in big boldly colored letters on her phone screen. It took a few attempts to get her message across during the hustle and bustle of the game, but she eventually got Hamiliton’s attention through the plexiglass.

And sure enough, her on-the-spot prognosis was right.

Hamilton received a biopsy which confirmed that the mole had been cancerous. And if it had gone unaddressed, it would have been life-threatening.

"It was only on the outer layer of my skin,'' Hamilton recalled at a news conference. "It hadn't penetrated to the second layer of my skin and that's because we caught it so early…And the words out of the doctor’s mouth were if I ignored that for four to five years, I wouldn’t be here.”

Moved by this stranger’s act of kindness, Hamilton wrote a heartfelt letter on social media in an attempt to reunite with the woman who saved his life.

His letter read:

"To this woman I am trying to find, you changed my life, and now I want to find you to say THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH! Problem is, I don’t know who you are or where you are from…we are looking for this incredible person…help us find a real life hero, so I can express my sincerest gratitude."

It didn’t take long before the message found its way to Popovici’s mother, who commented:

“She hasn’t even seen this message yet as she worked graveyard shift at the suicide crisis center in Seattle so she’s still asleep. She’ll be shocked to see this message! She will be at the game tonight in the same seats. She’ll be so happy and excited to know he got it checked! What wonderful news!!!! She just got accepted into multiple medical schools!"

Talk about the power of the internet.

And so, the pair had an incredibly sweet reunion at the start of the game that night.

Displaying a truly amazing amount of empathy, Popovici shared with Sportsnet:

"The fact that I got to look him in the eye and hear what happened from his perspective. Imagine how jarring that is to for you to be at work and someone just kind of looks at you and says, `Hey, maybe you go see a doctor.' That's not what you want to hear. So the fact that I got to see him and talk to his family members that have been really impacted by him dodging a big bullet that's so special.''

Popovici is well on her way to saving countless more lives, since both the Canucks and Kraken teamed up to provide a $10,000 scholarship for medical school expenses.

Popovici’s reaction to receiving the reward for her selfless act (in the tweet above) is as heartwarming as the giant kraken beanie she sports.

Though the Canucks won that night, they tweeted that Hamilton and Popovici being able to meet was their “biggest win.”

Popovici told Sportsnet that Hamiton’s mole was a “picture perfect example of what melanoma looks like.”

If you’re wondering what that picture perfect example is, one person left a very helpful tweet so that you might be able to tell the difference between a marking that's benign and one that’s malignant. (Of course, this doesn’t replace getting the help of a trained professional.)

And to Nadia Popovici, who continues to be of service, thank you. More than ever, efforts to show compassion don’t go unnoticed.


This article originally appeared two years ago.

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Education

Teacher mispronounces every student's name to get a laugh, but it also serves a bigger purpose

Oddly enough, this kind of silly roll call can make everyone feel equally welcome.

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A teacher mispronounced her students' names, which ironically may have made all of them feel more welcome.

Anyone who has lived in the U.S. with a nontraditionally American name knows how hard it can be to get some people to pronounce your name correctly.

My husband's name is Javad, which is only two syllables and objectively not hard to say (juh-VAHD), but I've watched many people mutilate it over the years even after being given the correct pronunciation. I remember one time watching him introduce himself to a man clearly and slowly—twice—and the man still called him "Bob," like he couldn't even digest this name he'd never heard before, much less pronounce it.

As a kid, at the beginning of every school year or every time a substitute teacher came around, it was common for my husband to have to correct the pronunciation of his name. Not the end of the world, but annoying. I can't imagine how much more annoying it is for people with longer names that aren't familiar to many American ears.

A video of a teacher mispronouncing every student's name has gotten a huge response on Reddit, presumably for the humor of it. The names she reads off the attendance list are ones that are common enough in the U.S. that pronunciation normally wouldn't be an issue—Luke, Jacob and Hunter, for example. But she manages to bungle them anyway—yes, even Luke—and it is genuinely funny.

But saying Luke as "Luck" and Hunter as "Hoonter" did more than just give her students a giggle. It also puts every student on the same playing field. If there were students in her class with less common names that might easily be mispronounced, they now find themselves in the same shoes as all of their classmates. They no longer stand out as "the kid with the name the teacher didn't know how to pronounce."

If every kid has to correct the teacher, then doing so is no big deal. No one is "othered" by it. It's just a funny thing they all do. And it also gives the teacher a chance to hear each kid's name from their own mouth instead of trying to read it off a list without ever hearing it.

The only risk here is accidentally pronouncing an unfamiliar name correctly the first time, but that seems unlikely. And it actually would probably just add another layer of humor to the already light atmosphere. Because a teacher mispronouncing a student's name can have a lasting impact, it's important to do what we can to keep it from happening.

The thing about unfamiliar names is that they usually aren't as hard to pronounce as people make them out to be. They're simply unfamiliar.

I mean, if we can pronounce Beethoven (which doesn't look like it sounds), Tchaikovsky (which has all those consonants) and Dostoyevsky (which has four syllables) without even thinking about it, we can learn to pronounce any name. In fact, Nigerian actress Uzo Aduba illustrated this exact point in a story about how her last name always made her the first kid in roll call and she was concerned that no one knew how to pronounce her name right. Her mother reassured her, "If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka."

It might take some practice, and we might have to ask people's forgiveness if it takes us a while, but it's not impossible.

Some people in the comments on Reddit pointed out that the teacher's roll call was an innovative way of making every student feel equally welcomed in the classroom. But even more said it reminded them of a hilarious Key & Peele skit about a hard-nosed substitute teacher mispronouncing students' names and getting angry when they corrected him.

A bit of a language warning in case you have little ones around, but it's great if you haven't seen it. You'll never see the name "Blake" the same way again.

This story originally appeared on 03.08.22

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Joy

People are loving this hilarious video of cheerleaders saving a stuck basketball

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Proof that cheerleading is the ultimate sport.

The true MVP during an NCAA March Madness game wasn’t even a basketball player. Instead, the game was saved by a couple of cheerleaders who quite literally rose to the challenge to save the day.

A hilarious clip sweeping the internet shows a basketball completely stuck between the backboard and shot clock as St. Mary’s College played against Indiana in Portland, Oregon.

Not even the tallest players could jump high enough to retrieve it. A mop didn’t work, a referee on a chair didn’t work. They were quickly running out of ideas.

“Major issues here in Portland,” the announcer chuckled.

I mean, they could have gotten another ball, but where’s the fun in that?

Luckily, inspiration hit!

Cassidy Cerny gracefully hoisted herself onto the shoulders of her teammate Nathan Paris in that effortless “why yes, I’m a cheerleader, I defy gravity all the time” way. Cerny grabbed the ball, the crowd went wild … and the rest is epic sports history.

Cerny and Paris went above and beyond (see what I did there?) to lift spirits. And people were quick to share their praises in the comments.

“It’s amazing how sometimes the most simple and mundane things cac bring people together,” one person wrote.

Another person added “I love moments like these. Proves humanity still exists in people.”

Showing true cheerleader spirit, Cerny told Good Morning America “just being able to bring that exposure to my team was really fun.”

And they say the perfect play doesn’t exist. When are these cheerleaders getting their trophy, already?

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She swam for 3 hours to escape the war in Syria before competing in the Olympics

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Syrian swimmer Yusra Mardini.

For Yusra Mardini, swimming means life. In more ways than one.

What started out as a passion became a saving grace, then a claim to fame, and finally … a higher purpose. As her story became a symbol of hope for refugees, it is clear that Mardini’s real superpower isn’t swimming, it’s resilience.

In 2015, when Mardini was only a teenager, her very survival depended on her ability to swim.

Mardini and her sister spent their childhood being trained in the pool by their father Ezzat, a former competitor for Syria’s national swimming team. But the daily shootouts during the Syrian civil war forced training to come to a stop. And after their father was arrested and beaten by soldiers, it was clear the sisters would have to flee their home.

It was by no means an easy journey.

The sisters took a plane to Lebanon, then Turkey, where they planned to smuggle into Germany by boat.

The boat was only a small dinghy, meant to carry seven passengers—that day there were 20 people trying to escape. But with only 45 minutes to endure, the risk was worth taking.

At only 20 minutes in, the motor failed. The group became stranded in the Aegean Sea, their boat filling up with water. Action had to be taken, and fast. Mardini shares in an interview that her sister was the first to jump in the water.

“My sister jumped in the water from one side, and I jumped from the other side, which she wasn’t very happy about. She started screaming at me to go up to the boat even though we were both swimmers.”

Two men dived in to help, and the group of four pushed the boat through the rough waves all the way to shore. It would take them three hours to make it to safety.

It was in that moment that Mardini got her first glimpse at how her actions would represent the hearts of refugees everywhere. “The whole way, you can just hear all of our prayers in one voice,” she reflected.

The Mardini sisters made it the rest of the way (through seven more countries) to Germany on foot, but it wouldn’t be long before Yusra was back in the water. This time, it would be for the Olympics.

Mardini continued her training in Germany, and in 2016 she was selected to compete in the Summer Olympics in Brazil as part of the first Refugee Olympic Team.

Though she didn’t earn a medal, her story captured hearts everywhere. As the crowd applauded her arrival, Mardini’s shame at being a refugee transformed into a sense of pride. It inspired her to become the youngest Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in history.

As a Goodwill Ambassador, the message Mardini continues to share is simple: "A refugee is a human like any other."

At 23, Mardini returned to the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, bearing a flag for the Refugee Team during the opening ceremony.

Again, though she didn’t place, it was a different kind of win for this young woman who defied the odds to make it to the Olympics—twice—in the first place. Sometimes it’s more than distance, speed and laps. The real accomplishment is keeping the dream alive, believing in something bigger than yourself … and inspiring others to do the same.


"I've told this story a million times," Mardini told DW, "and if I have to, I'll tell it a million more times. It's about giving hope with my life story…maybe I can help give people courage."

Her journey has only just begun.

Since that seemingly fated event in 2015, a lot continues to happen for Mardini. Netflix is producing a movie about the sisters, and Mardini released a memoir titled Butterfly, a nod to one of her swimming styles. And both Mardini and her sister have dedicated their lives to helping refugees.

If you look at Mardini’s Instagram now, where she has 375,000 followers, she is currently promoting a UNHCR charity to support Ukrainians fleeing war.

She writes in a post, ”as a refugee myself I had to leave everything behind and do understand their pain.”

We do not always choose what comes to us in life. But our greatest potential might be just past our biggest obstacle. Determination to fight for that potential, along with compassion for others … makes heroes of us all.

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