By Express News Service

KOCHI:For the past few months, a family from Karor Lal Esan in Pakistan had been searching for paediatric cardiothoracic surgeon Dr John Valiattu. At last, they found him on the website of Believers Church Medical College, Tiruvalla.

It was Dr Valiattu, a surgeon at Royal Hospital in Muscat, Oman, who performed the first surgery on five-month-old Afiya in 1998. She was born with a heart condition called Truncus Arteriosus and had to get her heart valve replaced. The second surgery when she was 13 was also a success.

Afiya and her family eventually moved back to Pakistan. When it was time for the third surgery, her father Hafeez Malik approached top hospitals and specialists in Pakistan. But they guaranteed only a 40 per cent success rate. It was then that the family started searching for Dr Valiattu, who had also shifted to Kerala in the meantime. After contacting Believers Church Medical College, they applied for a medical visa to visit India.

Afiya, a postgraduate student in IT at Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan, came to Kerala with her sister Dr Riswana and brother Shuhaib in the first week of July.In the last week of July, a complicated six-hour-long surgery was performed by a team comprising Dr Valiattu, Dr Kannan R Nair, anaesthetists Dr Sajith Sulaiman and Dr Benson Abraham, heart-lung machine technicians Salim and Anantitha, anaesthesia technicians Senthil and Bibin and six nursing staff.

After the successful surgery, Afiya and her siblings returned home.Afiya’s sister Dr Riswana, who is a radiologist, said that if India and Pakistan were on friendlier terms, many patients there would be able to access medical facilities in India.