Stephen Applegate and Mark L Fox went to high school together. Then life sent them in different directions. Stephen went into intensive care and stayed there forty-two years. Mark went into engineering, and later founded Resona Health.

Decades on, they ran into each other again. By then Stephen was a partner at Joyful Wellness Center in Cocoa, running an energy room he had helped build. He invited his old classmate over. Mark showed up with a bag of goodies, and one of them was the VIBE.

Stephen lets almost nothing into his building. He is, in his words, the most skeptical man there. But he knew what his old friend had spent his career doing.

“Somebody I respect, like you, Mark, with your background, I’m gonna listen. I’m gonna take it serious. I have to at least try it.”

Two kids from the same high school, back at the same table.

Years before, when Stephen became clinical director for the energy system, he needed a place on the Space Coast to run it. Joy worked nights beside him in the ICU. She overheard him talking and asked what he was up to.

He told her he was hunting for a space. She said, “I have a building.” Follow me after work, she told him. Twelve thousand square feet. The center is named for her.

Joy still works nights at the hospital. Now she wears a BlueVibe on her wrist, and she stays alert and focused through the shift. “She used to nod off all the time,” Stephen says. “That’s for night nurses.”

The nurse who gave the center a home now carries a piece of it through the night.

Forty-two years of night shifts. Stephen spent them keeping other people alive until morning. His own sleep paid for it.

For a while he didn’t even notice the Sleep protocol on his VIBE. The night he found it, he punched it in and lay down. His cat curled up on one side of the device. His dog took the other.

“They’re both out, and then I was out. I slept all night, except one time at five in the morning.”

He checks his Kario wellness watch in the morning now, and he likes what it shows.

Four decades watching the night. Now he sleeps through it.

Here is where Stephen almost stopped the story. He was nervous to sell the VIBE at all.

“I thought, well, nobody’s gonna use my energy room. They’ll all be carrying VIBEs.”

He went out on a limb anyway. Clients took a VIBE home for vacations and for the days between appointments. Families shared them, or bought the two-pack. And then they came back through the door.

“They still come back for the energy room. So I said, this is a good marriage. We haven’t divorced yet, right, Mark?”

TJ is a thirteen-year-old Labradoodle, and he was his wife’s therapy dog. In February, the vets said there was nothing more they could do.

Stephen brought him to the center. Energy room one day. The VIBE the next, on Kidney Support, Liver Support, and General Inflammation, round and round, every day he was on the hydrogen too.

“I’m telling you, the VIBE was really noticeable in the way he recovered so quickly.”

By the end of March he was acting like a four-year-old. Stephen carried every day’s notes back to the same vet, who shook her head and asked what he was doing.

He left the vet with no options. He came back acting like a pup.

People still walk in and call it woo-woo. Stephen doesn’t argue. He started out right where they are.

“Give it two to four weeks and see what happens. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.”