A teenager is making medical history after surviving a surgery so rare that only one other person in the country has ever recovered well enough to leave the hospital.

Andrew Miles, an 18-year-old recent high school graduate, was born with acute systolic heart failure — a condition that leaves the heart too weak to pump blood.

For years, doctors told his family a transplant wasn’t possible. Many turned him away. That changed when he met Dr. Mani Daneshmand, one of the inventors of the HeartMate 6 LVAD, a mechanical pump designed to replace the function of the failing heart.

"He took Andrew when nobody else would," Amy Miles, Andrew's mom, said. "It was our last resort - and he gave him a chance to live."

Daneshmand explained how the breakthrough device worked in Andrew’s case.

"We used

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