A B.C. woman who is battling cancer wants Vancouver Canucks goalie Roberto Luongo to know that he has made the most important save of all: Her life.

Desperate to find motivation to help her cope through draining rounds of thyroid cancer treatment, Leigh Maureen Thornton turned to her love of hockey.

Thornton, 38, a nurse who lives in Victoria, has had a tough time with her health since she was a child, including having Crohn’s disease. She thought she’d had her share of illness in life, but then her health worsened and in 2011, doctors told her that she had thyroid cancer and that it had metastasized into her lymph nodes.

She was terrified. Ever the cheery optimist, Thornton now felt crushing defeat and didn’t think she had the mental strength to endure surgery and radioactive isotope therapy.

“You hear the word cancer and you think death sentence,” she said, in an interview Saturday. “I felt like I had been beaten back so many times in my life, and how much can one body take anyway?”

Housebound and without a voice for 10 months because of damage to her right vocal cord caused by surgery, Thornton watched a lot of TV during recovery, mostly hockey and hockey interviews.

In the fall of 2011, she watched as Luongo continued to endure the backlash from that summer’s Stanley Cup loss to the Chicago Blackhawks.

She was shocked by how much vitriol fans hurled at the goaltender over his performance, when really, she said, he is “the embodiment of determination.”

She began to imagine that Luongo was playing hockey as if he was trying to save his life — and it helped her to visualize fighting for her own.

“I was reading all the criticism, and there was so much negativity, almost bullying ... yet under all that pressure he was so mentally strong and poised,” she said.

It was then she told herself that if Luongo could block out all that negativity from people all over the country, then perhaps she could block out the negative thoughts about dying and focus on her goal to survive.

As she waits for a body scan in March to find out whether she is cancer free, Thornton wanted to thank Luongo. So she wrote him a letter and posted it on Facebook, hoping he might see it one day.

In the poignant letter, she says she drew strength from watching him pick himself up every time he was defeated.

“I wanted so badly to pull through [the cancer] but felt no strength inside me, however I watched you play hockey in such a way as if you were trying to save your life,” she wrote.

“I drew strength from your strength. You were poised when things were tough. You made me see I could keep it together too.”

In closing the letter, Thornton writes to Luongo: “You may not know this but you made another save ... My Life.”

Although she has yet to find out whether the cancer is gone, Thornton said her doctors have told her that her blood work looks good, she feels healthy and has more energy, and doesn’t have any of the symptoms of cancer.