Lechien’s Story

People ask me why a space shuttle engineer spends his days building frequency devices for dogs and their humans. The honest answer is a black lab named Lechien. This is her story, and it is a true one.

1990: A puppy named “The Dog”

Lechien came into our lives in 1990. If your French is rusty, her name is a joke my wife and I never got tired of — le chien simply means “the dog.” She was The Dog the way the sun is The Sun. There was no other.

She was born for the outdoors. We lived in Utah in those years, and she climbed slickrock canyons like she had suction cups for paws. She charged into every lake, creek, and puddle between the Wasatch and the Pacific. One Fourth of July we found an abandoned homemade log raft on a mountain lake, and while our friend Danny poled it across the water like Huck Finn, Lechien waded escort beside it, refusing to be a passenger when she could be crew.

My wife Barbara reminds me of the detail that explains every water photo we have of her: Lechien was three-quarters black Lab and one-quarter German Shepherd. Labs are born for water. Shepherds want no part of it. The two sides of her never settled the argument — she would charge into any lake in the Rockies like her Lab ancestors demanded, and then stop, chest-deep, the instant her paws couldn’t feel the bottom, like her Shepherd quarter insisted. Twelve years, a hundred lakes, and she never once swam out of her own depth. Go look at our old photos: she’s always wading, never floating. A truce between her ancestors, negotiated one shoreline at a time.

Twelve years of that. Trails, canyons, lakes, tailgates, campfires. If you have ever had a dog who is happiest twenty feet ahead of you on a trail, looking back to make sure you’re coming — you had a Lechien too.

2002: The morning at the bottom of the stairs

Then came a morning in 2002 that I have replayed for twenty-four years.

My wife and I heard it at the same time. Lechien was standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at us, crying. She had climbed those stairs ten thousand times. She had never once made that sound.

Somebody wasn’t going to work that day. We flipped a coin. I lost — or, looking back, I won — and I drove her to the vet.

The news was bad. Arthritis, and not in one joint. Through her whole spine.

A very good friend of mine is one of the most forward-thinking veterinarians I know, and he told me something that sounded ridiculous: “There’s a lady in Oregon with a machine that’s reversing arthritis.” A machine. For arthritis. I’m a rocket scientist — I was chief engineer on the Space Shuttle program — and everything I knew said that was nonsense. But she was my dog. So I made the appointment, and I planned the drive to Oregon.

We never made it. Lechien got so sick, so fast, that my vet looked at me and said: don’t put her in the car and do that to her.

So I didn’t. She passed in 2002, twelve years old. I never got to find out whether the machine would have helped her.

The skeptic goes looking

Here’s the thing about rocket scientists: we are professional skeptics. You don’t strap human beings to a controlled explosion on a hunch. So when I started looking into that “magic machine” — pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, PEMF — I fully expected to bury the idea and move on with my grief.

The research wouldn’t let me. People say, “ah, it’s all voodoo, there’s no science.” There are tens of thousands of published papers on PEMF. Tens of thousands. NASA studied it. The FDA had cleared PEMF devices for bone healing back in 1979. The technology was real.

What made me angry was where it lived: held hostage in clinics, inside machines the size of beer kegs, priced at $20,000 to $30,000. Real relief existed — for whoever could drive to it and afford it. Lechien couldn’t even survive the drive.

I’m a chemical engineer by training, not electrical, and I figured: a coil, an amplifier, a battery — how hard could it be? The answer is: very. There used to be a pile of failed prototype coils in my workshop eight feet tall before my wife finally threw it away. But stubbornness is a renewable resource. Twenty-four years after that morning at the stairs, the machine that was too far away for Lechien fits in a shirt pocket — or in a soft vest that rests over a dog’s heart. We call it the VIBE.

Daisy May, and the dogs after her

Years later, on a walk along the canals near my home in Florida, I met a man whose 10-year-old black lab, Daisy May, was limping badly. Black lab. Bad joints. You can imagine what that did to me. I told him, “I’ll be right back,” went and got a VIBE, and said: “Put this around her neck on the Arthritis protocol. See if it works.”

His words, not mine: “Look at it, man. It works.”

I love stories like that. And — because I’m still that skeptic — I refuse to run a company on them. Stories aren’t data. So today we’re doing something nobody else in this industry does: a structured canine wellness study we call C3I, where every dog wears a biometric collar around the clock, every dog is measured against its own baseline, and an AI recommends and adjusts the protocols. Some dogs improve dramatically. Some don’t. We publish what we find either way, because a rocket scientist who fools himself gets people hurt.

Therapy, measurement, learning, adjustment — around and around, a health flywheel for your dog. That’s what grew out of one crying dog at the bottom of one staircase in Utah.

Why I’m telling you this

I was too late for Lechien. That is simply a fact I live with. But I’ve spent twenty-four years making sure you don’t have to be too late for yours — no clinic, no $30,000 machine, no drugs, and a full 30 days to see what it does for your dog before you owe me a dime of loyalty.

She started this. Your dog gets to finish it.

— Mark Fox
Founder, Resona Health · Cocoa Beach, Florida