Rebecca Blair, an ultrasound technician at TriStar Greenview Regional Hospital, keeps a bucketful of her handmade bracelets on hand at the hospital to give to patients getting mammograms.

Rebecca Blair elicited tears of joy from a TriStar Greenview Regional Hospital patient recently, and the two never met.

Blair probably does that a lot.

An ultrasound technician at Greenview, Blair took it upon herself last year to turn her hobby of bracelet-making into an outreach to patients having mammograms.

Those patients now receive a bracelet made by Blair and usually bearing a bead with the pink ribbon representing breast cancer awareness.

It’s a small gesture that one of Blair’s co-workers says can go a long way.

“I had a patient tear up a little bit and give me a hug after I gave her the bracelet,” said Cierra Willis, a radiology technician at Greenview. “Each day, there’s at least one person who has had something bad in their life. The bracelets help.

“I think it’s amazing that she (Blair) does that in her spare time.”

That she can fashion bracelets out of beads and cord and give the finished product away is not nearly as amazing as how Blair fashioned her giving nature out of a tragic event.

In 2004, Blair’s husband, Mark Blair, died of brain cancer, leaving her to raise their two children on her own.

Giving up her job as an instructional assistant, Blair earned her ultrasound technician certification and started the job that would lead her to help others through her bracelets.

“My husband’s death helped pave the way for me to get into the medical field,” said Blair, 56. “Any bad news you get can always lead to something good.”

That attitude led Blair to turn her longtime hobby into a vehicle for helping others.

“I’ve always made bracelets as a hobby,” she said. “I saw these beads with pink ribbons for breast cancer awareness, and I started using them to make bracelets for our staff.”

Her background as the spouse of a cancer patient then led Blair to expand her bracelet gifts to others who had been touched by the disease.

“When you’re diagnosed with something as tragic as cancer, you often think it’s a death sentence,” Blair said. “It’s scary.”

To allay those fears, Blair began making bracelets for the hospital’s cancer patients and for breast cancer survivors. That led to her current practice of making bracelets for anyone who gets a mammogram.

Blair, who said she has made thousands of bracelets over the years, has paid for many of the gifts out of her own pocket but now gets help from Greenview in making the items that she says are a token of her wish for all the patients.

“I just want them to know that somebody cares,” she said.