Jamie Lynn Spears is opening up about a harrowing ATV accident that left her daughter in a coma… and a priest reading the child her last rites.
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“That was the day I thought I’d lost my daughter,” the 35-year-old told PEOPLE about the 2017 incident that nearly claimed the life of her now 18-year-old daughter Maddie. “Against all odds, this baby girl fought to be here.”
Maddie was only 8 years old when an ATV she was allowed to drive ended up submerged in a pond on their property in Fluker, Louisiana.
“We were watching her. We still don’t quite know if she was dodging a dog or what it was,” Jamie Lynn recalled. “She went in the water, and me, my father-in-law and my husband ran as fast as we could to go jump in to get her out, but she was stuck under the ATV.”
Jamie Lynn’s mother-in-law called 911, and first responders arrived within minutes to help free Maddie.
However, when the child was finally pulled from the water, Spears recalls a moment of horror.
“It was really not a sight anybody wants to see,” Jamie Lynn admitted to PEOPLE. “At that point, she was not breathing.”
“We thought that she had passed,” the Sweet Magnolias star added.
When a firefighter announced they “got a pulse,” Maddie was airlifted to a hospital. The child was in a coma for two days.
Jamie Lynn Spears’ Recalls Her Daughter’s Coma: ‘She Was in There and Felt All of Us Praying’
Jamie Lynn Spears also detailed how a priest was called to read her daughter her last rites. And the moment Maddie broke from her coma.
“He comes in, and she physically sits up in all her restraints and tubes,” Jamie Lynn recalled. “I’m screaming for the doctors, like ‘Come in here now!’ Even the priest was like, ‘I’ve never seen anything like what’s happening.’ I knew she was in there and felt all of us praying. We were given a miracle, and I don’t take it for granted.”
“I feel like our faith got a lot stronger,” Maddie said of the near-death experience. “In the end, I think such a negative experience affected us positively.”
Maddie also told the outlet she used the dramatic moment to ask her mom for her biggest wish: a little sibling.
“You going to give me that baby?” she asked her mother at the time. “I was like, ‘Oh, He’s already calling in,’ ” Jamie Lynn remembered shooting back at the 8-year-old.
A few months later, Jamie Lynn became pregnant with her second daughter, Ivey. She and her husband, Jamie Watson, welcomed Ivey, now 8, in 2018.
“We always say she went up to heaven to go pick out her little sister,” Jamie Lynn told the outlet. “Ivey’s like, ‘So you did all of that to find me?'”
Maddie will study health sciences and play softball at the University of Southern Mississippi this August.
“I feel like I don’t get to ask for anything else in life because I got the biggest blessing,” Jamie Lynn added of her daughter’s near-death experience.