FEMALE NARRATOR: A title: Empowerment. Jake's mother, Dee.
DEE: The one thing that surprised me? I don't know that there's been one thing, really. However, I guess if I had to sum it up as one thing - He never ceases to amaze me. You know when he was born, he was born with hydrocephalus which was due to a neural tube defect that was a fluke of nature. And we were told that we don't know if he's gonna live, and then when he lived, we don't know what he's going to see or hear. We don't know that he'll be ever be able to move or talk or do anything. And I just said, "Well, I guess we will see what God has in store for us." And then each day, we took one day at a time, always keeping in the back of our head - down the road where do we want to go with this? But right now, today, what can we do? And as we took one day at a time over the last 22 years he would continually show me things, and I, if I just observed him and his actions, he always amazed me with what he knew, what he understood, what he was trying to communicate. When he was trying to ask questions - but he never had questioned words when he was younger. But if I started just feeding him information, and if that didn't work trying a different way to feed him information, and that didn't work tried a different way to feed him information, that he would just grow and bloom and constantly change. And then later on you would see it come out and you'd be like, "Wow, that really made sense to him and we haven't even looked at that or talked about that for months or weeks.
NARRATOR: While Dee spoke a series of photos showed Jake as a toddler, a young Jake wearing yellow goggles, a young Jake in a blue hat holding a cookie-cutter, several people including Jake with a pinata, a young Jake holding a toy, Jake standing in a hallway, Jake and an adult male outside touching an informational sign about a dinosaur and Jake stirring a bullet reddish liquid with a wisk.