He's fast, strong and powerful. Myles Honda can flip his opponent in a split-second.
The 16-year-old judo competitor has been a national champion in his age and weight class.
"Oh, it's a lot of training and hard work," Honda said.
But training became even harder when Honda's left arm started to bother him.
"It's not really a pain," Honda explained. "It was more like extreme fatigue in my arm."
His dad, who's also his coach, noticed Honda's performance was suffering.
"When he was practicing the hard practices, he had no strength in the left arm," recalled his dad, Alan Honda.
Doctors explained that Honda was born with a defect. The artery in his arm didn't connect to the main artery in his heart. That meant he had no pulse in his arm.
"They hadn't been able to measure a blood pressure in the arm," explained Dr. William Quinones-Baldrich, vascular surgeon and director of the UCLA Aortic Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.
To fix it, UCLA surgeons took Honda's short arm artery and connected it to his left carotid artery, which also connects to the aorta in his heart. That restored blood flow in the arm and gave him normal circulation.
"Right after we did reconstruction, we could feel the pulse in his wrist," Quinones-Baldrich said.
Now, Honda is back at it, and stronger than ever.
"He's a very strong kid. I wouldn't want to get in his way," Quinones-Baldrich said.
Doctors said it's rare that someone Honda's age would have poor circulation symptoms. If he didn't exercise so vigorously, he may not have ever had any symptoms.
Honda holds a brown belt in judo and is planning to train for a black belt, the highest rank. He's considering training for the Olympics one day.
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