Jamie Lynn Spears broke down in tears as she recalled an horrific five minutes when she thought her daughter had drowned.
Jamie Lynn Spears broke down in tears as she recalled an horrific five minutes when she thought her daughter had drowned
The 32-year-old actress rushed to try to save her daughter Maddie, 15, in February 2017 after she had flipped an all-terrain vehicle (ATV) into a pond at their Louisiana estate, leaving her submerged underwater for several minutes.
Jamie Lynn has told how she heard her mother-in-law telling her mum that Maddie, who was eight at the time, had died, only for a fire fighter to reveal "three seconds later" that they had found a pulse on the youngster.
Speaking on reality TV show 'I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!' - on which she is a contestant - she told her fellow campmates: "I almost lost my oldest daughter ... she drowned and we couldn't save her.
"We tried really hard. She was trapped under a little side-by-side that we ride around our pond.
"This is in 2017. She was eight or nine or something like that.
"My father-in-law, my mother-in-law, me and my husband, we run to jump in to save her.
"In that moment you think, 'This is not real, she's going to pop up, this isn't real.' '
"I could feel her arm, and I'm jerking it, I couldn't get her up because it's a pretty heavy machine.
"In that moment you think, you know logically she's been under water too long… nobody can live if they've been under water this long. You logically are thinking these things.
"Then you hear the sirens coming. Thank god my mother-in-law, first thing she did was call 911 ... she was caught in the safety netting. So when they got there, she was not alive. They took her from me and they incubated her.
"I was sitting on the rocks, I'd thrown up on myself, the adrenalin, then I heard her [my mother-in-law] call my mum and say, 'Lynn, we've lost Maddie.'
"Then the fire fighter came over three seconds later and was like, 'We've got a pulse, we've got a pulse...'
"They airlifted her ... she's hooked up on life support, breathing machines and all that ... they come in, a priest to read her her last rites, and when they did, her body physically sat up, her spirit responded to it for whatever reason ..."
The 'Zoey 101' actress - who has Maddie with her ex Casey Aldridge, and daughter Ivey, five, with husband Jamie Watson - became a Catholic after the "miracle" incident.
Jamie added: "She got better and better every day and walked out of the hospital. This has no repercussions.
"So that's when I became Catholic. For about five minutes I thought I'd lost my daughter and then I was given the miracle of having her back."
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