The Tryon Seventh-day Adventist Church will hold a promotion ceremony to honor Captain Heather Blomeley at 10:45 a.m. on Saturday, March 5. The rank of Captain in the Navy is equivalent to Colonel in the Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps and is indicated by a silver eagle or four gold stripes. Participants in the ceremony will wear the Navy Dress Blue uniform, which designates rank by the number of stripes on the cuffs of the sleeves.

Captain Blomeley is a pediatric anesthesiologist who travels extensively and calls the Columbus/Tryon area home. She is a member of the Tryon Seventh-day Adventist Church and attended school there, at Mount Pisgah Academy in Candler, N.C., at Southern College of SDAs (now Southern Adventist University) in Collegedale, Tenn., and at Loma Linda University School of Medicine in Loma Linda, Ca.

Blomeley was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve in 1987 on the Health Professions Scholarship Program, graduating from medical school in 1991. Her active-duty Army service includes an internship year at William Beaumont Army Medical Center in El Paso, Tx., and four years as a flight surgeon, first with the 4th – 228th Aviation Regiment in Honduras and then with the 24th Aviation Brigade in Savannah, Ga. She transferred to the Navy Reserve in 1997 while in residency training in anesthesiology at UNC-Chapel Hill, graduating in 1999.

Blomeley’s active-duty Naval service includes four years as a staff anesthesiologist, first at the naval hospital in Puerto Rico and then at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, including two months in the Persian Gulf aboard the USNS COMFORT during the second Iraq war; a one-year fellowship in pediatric anesthesiology at Loma Linda in 2003; and two years as the director of pediatric anesthesia at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., including a six-month deployment to Djibouti, Africa, in support of the war in Afghanistan.

Blomeley left active duty in 2006 to pursue a second fellowship in regional anesthesiology at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, and has worked 16 locum tenens anesthesiology contracts in six states since that time. She is a member of the Selected Reserve, attached to the Navy Operational Support Center in Charlotte, N.C., and drills with OHSU CL DET A, the medical unit supporting the Marines at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Doctor Blomeley is the daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Charles P. Blomeley of Mill Spring. Her brother Kevin and sister-in-law Jennifer live in Huntington Beach, Ca., with their 18-month-old twins, Emma and Ryan. Her brother Geoff, his fiancee’ Ashley Rushford, and her daughter, Ava, live in Las Vegas, Nev.

The Tryon SDA Church (828-859-6407, tryonsdachurch.org) is located at 2820 Lynn Road, on Highway 108 across from the Mimosa Inn. The public is invited to attend.