KARACHI: Syrian-born Abdul Salam Majeed Agha was just 18 when he arrived in Pakistan’s southern port city of Karachi in 2005 to earn a medical degree and return home. Twenty-one years later, Agha, now a successful cardiologist, says the city where he trained and built his career has become his home.

Agha, who works at Memon Medical Institute, came to Pakistan on a scholarship under an educational exchange arrangement with Syria. His journey from a foreign medical student to a specialist treating Pakistani patients highlights the lasting personal and professional ties forged through educational cooperation between the two countries.

“Karachi is my home, without any exaggeration,” Agha told Arab News in an interview last week. “I can’t call it the second home, but I mean, for many years being over here, probably it’s the first home right now.”

The 40-year-old said he had applied for scholarship in several countries and had not specifically chosen Pakistan as his destination.

“Probably Pakistan has chosen me and has called me,” he said.

After graduating from Karachi’s Dow Medical College, Agha pursued further training in internal medicine and cardiology at Aga Khan University Hospital and later specialized in interventional cardiology at Tabba Heart Institute.

What was meant to be a temporary stay gradually became his life in Pakistan as he developed relationships with colleagues, friends and patients.

“I am 100 percent Pakistani doctor,” he said. “All my basics, all the ABCs of medicine, I have learned it over here on this beautiful land.”

But the transition was not always easy.

Agha arrived knowing little about Pakistani culture and could not speak Urdu, the country’s national language.

Over time, he began learning the language through his interactions with patients, who he credits with helping him adjust to life in Karachi.

“I think my patients were my teachers,” he said.

While the conflict in Syria, which began in early 2011 and transformed into a full-blown civil war a year later, complicated Agha’s plans to return to his home country, he chose to continue practicing in Pakistan instead of moving to another Arab country or elsewhere as many Syrians did during the years of upheaval.

“Somehow Pakistan loves me and I love it as well,” he said. “So I continue this way.”

Among the experiences that have shaped his medical career in Pakistan was a critically ill patient who suffered cardiac arrest after arriving at hospital with a major heart attack in Aug. this year.

Agha recalled that the man’s pulse did not return despite more than 20 minutes of resuscitation. He decided to attempt an angioplasty to reopen a blocked coronary artery while his team continued cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR.

“I said, ‘let me just try. And probably if I open the artery, which has caused the heart attack, I might do some difference’,” he recalled.

“So the artery was opened and then his pulse started coming back.”

Agha said the procedure lasted about three and a half hours, and the patient was discharged from hospital 10 days later.

Around six weeks later, the man returned for a hospital event, walking onto the stage before the doctors and staff who had witnessed his critical condition.

“I could see people coming [to greet him] with tears in their eyes,” Agha said, describing the emotional response to the patient’s recovery.

For the cardiologist, the experience reinforced his sense of purpose in the country where he had received his medical education.

He says he has grown accustomed to nearly every aspect of life in Karachi, but the strongest connection was the opportunity to serve the people of the city that had trained him.

“It gives me an honor and pleasure that the place where I have learned all these skills and knowledge, I am helping the people of the same land,” Agha said.