❤️ Sweet Home Alabama

Shahzeb Anwer has been plagued with hyperparathyroidism since his teenage years. The condition has caused a variety of health complications for the Pakistani man, including painful kidney stones over the past few years.

✈️ The great unknown... Shahzeb desperately needed surgery to treat the issue, but the procedure wasn't available in his home country. 

After researching hospitals around the world for the best doctors to perform the surgery, he finally found his answer in a medical team from the United States in a place he had never heard of before... Birmingham, Alabama. 

• Shahzeb decided to travel to Birmingham to have the procedure done, leaving his fiancé and Pakistan for the first time in his life to travel to the States.

🤗 No all new friends... When Shahzeb finally made it to Birmingham, he was greeted by a host of strangers offering him rides around town, or to-and-from the hospital.

• One resident in particular, Andrew Harris, took Shahzeb under his wing for his whole trip. The two hit it off, and by the end called each other "best friends for life."

👏👍 Mission: accomplished... Shahzeb's surgery was successful, and he was finally cured of the condition he's lived with for years.

When he finally made it back to Pakistan, he had a wedding to prepare for – and a few people to add to the guest list.

💒 Come one, come all... Shahzeb decided to invite all of Birmingham to his wedding. While no one was able to make the trip on such short notice, he used the invite as a way to return all of the kindness he received.

• “Birmingham treated me as their favored son,” he said. “Birmingham literally gave me the attention that people give out to celebrities… So that’s why I did it... Birmingham has now become a part of my life.” 

Lynyrd Skynyrd would be proud.👏