Our Story

I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 2019. If you've never had someone sit you down and tell you that your body no longer makes the one hormone keeping you alive, it's hard to explain what that does to you. I was a guy who ate what I wanted, drank what I wanted, and never thought twice about any of it. Suddenly I'm being told I need to manually enter every carb and glucose reading before or at the start of every meal — and dose insulin to match. Every time. For the rest of my life.

At the time, I didn't even know what a real carb was. I'm not exaggerating. I had no idea. And I was always on the go — running jobs, living fast — so stopping to calculate and enter numbers before every meal felt like learning a foreign language at full speed.

But you adapt. You learn the system. You start trusting your pump, your sensor, your routine. And after a while, you stop thinking about how close to the edge you really are.

That's when things go wrong.

My insulin pump broke and I had to send it off for a replacement. By the time the new one came in, I'd forgotten my exact settings. I programmed the pump to deliver 10 units of insulin per hour instead of 1. Ten times the dose. And I had no idea.

Around 4 AM, my pump alarm started going off. My wife Makenzie woke up, made me a banana with peanut butter, and got me some apple juice. I ate it, drank it, but I couldn't really fall back asleep. I was sweating, out of it. The insulin was winning and I didn't fully understand what was happening.

I decided to take a shower — thinking it would help me feel normal. Ten units an hour still flooding my body with insulin while my blood sugar cratered. Later that morning, Makenzie found me unresponsive in the shower. Paramedics came.

I woke up on the floor, surrounded by first responders. Makenzie saved my life that morning. The banana and apple juice she gave me at 4 AM bought me time — but it wasn't enough to stop the downfall. If she hadn't found me when she did, I wouldn't be here writing this.

No text was sent to my family. No one outside that house was notified. My parents, my brother, everyone else — they had zero idea I was dying.

You'd think almost dying once would be enough to figure it out. I've had a continuous glucose monitor from the beginning — a sensor on my body that continuously syncs with my pump in real time. I thought I was covered.

But here's the thing about this disease: the technology isn't perfect, and you're human. When my sensor goes out and isn't linked to the pump, I have to guess my carbs and dose manually. I always set it a little short — maybe 5 carbs less than what I actually ate — so that when the sensor and pump sync back up, the system auto-corrects the difference. It's a workaround. Every diabetic has them.

About a month before I started building Vigil, I did exactly that. New sensor went on, but it didn't register the insulin I already had on board. So the pump dosed another 5 units on top of the 4 I'd already given myself. Nearly double what I needed. And I had no idea.

That night I was staying at my mother-in-law's house, watching her dogs while she and her husband were out of town. I went to bed alone. And my blood sugar dropped — below 40, so low the sensor stopped reading entirely. Just went blank.

Normally when I go low, my body breaks out in sweats and wakes me up. But I had the AC turned down and it was cold in the house, so my body never got the signal. The pump was probably alarming, but I was too far gone to hear it.

What saved me was her dog. He jumped on the bed crying and wouldn't stop until I came to enough to stand up. I walked to the kitchen on autopilot, grabbed a box of cereal, and went back to bed. About fifteen minutes later I actually came to — fully aware for the first time — and realized what was happening. I went back to the kitchen and ate six bowls of cereal to bring my sugar back up.

That night alone could have been the end of me. My wife didn't know. My parents didn't know. Nobody knew until I told them the next morning.

Thanks to my savior Jesus Christ, I'm still here. He wasn't ready for me to come home yet. And I believe there's a reason for that.

After the second time, I couldn't stop thinking about all the things that had to go right for me to still be here. A wife who heard the alarm. A dog that wouldn't stop crying. My savior keeping me here for a reason. That's what was keeping me alive — not the technology, not my medical devices.

I'm a husband. I'm a father. I'm a Chickasaw Nation citizen. And I'm a Type 1 diabetic who got tired of his family not knowing when he was in danger.

So I built what should have existed all along.

Vigil watches your blood sugar around the clock and texts your family when something goes wrong. It's not an app you have to remember to check. It's not an alarm you might sleep through. It's not a notification sitting on a phone in the other room. It's a text message to the people who love you, the moment your numbers say something is wrong. And if nobody responds, it starts calling them. One by one. Until someone picks up.

My goal is to save lives. But it's bigger than that. I want family members and caregivers to be more aware of the day-to-day struggles that diabetics live with — not just the emergencies, but the constant, quiet fight that most people never see. Because when the people around you understand what you're going through, everything changes.

I built this because I almost left my family twice without them ever knowing I was in trouble. I'm building this so that never happens to you.

Patent: US Provisional #64/013,585 (Patent Pending)

Vigil Health LLC was born out of two near-death experiences and the realization that no technology existed to simply text your family when your blood sugar was dangerous. Not an app they had to download. Not a notification they had to check. A text. On the phone they already carry. From someone who's always watching.

We're not a medical device company. We don't replace your doctor, your CGM, or your insulin pump. We're the safety net underneath all of it. The layer that makes sure the people who love you know what's happening, even when you can't tell them yourself.