Jamie Lynn Spears has confided in her I’m A Celebrity campmates about a freak accident that resulted in her narrowly avoiding losing her daughter for good.
Speaking to her campmates – who are now one lighter following Grace Dent’s withdrawal – Spears recalled the moment her daughter Maddie became trapped underwater and had to be resuscitated by emergency services back home in the USA.
The recollection of the harrowing tale came after Sam Thompson tried to describe to Spears how he imagined her home life would be.
Thompson quipped Spears her sister Britney and the rest of the family would gather to eat crawfish, to which Spears revealed her singing sister is a big fan of the dish.
“We’re from Louisiana, we love crawfish,” Spears said. “My sister and all of us, we love crawfish so much, but she [Britney] only wanted the good crawfish.
“So the company in Louisiana would have them overnighted in a box for her, in an ice chest.
“Even in Vegas, she’d have crawfish, [she’d be] eating crawfish in the Elton John suite.”
Jamie Lynn Spears told her campmates the story in the jungle
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As the conversation went on and as Spears began to open up about her family, she then reminisced about the near-death experience with her eldest daughter, Maddie
“I almost lost my oldest daughter,” Spears said. “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 and you kind of in that moment you think, this is not real, she’s going to pop up, this isn’t real.”
Jamie Lynn Spears cried in the camp
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Delving into the details, Spears added: “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.”
Recalling how she feared the worst, Spears told her captivated campmates: “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, ‘Lynne, we’ve lost Maddie.’
Marvin Humes comforted Jamie Lynn Spears
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“Then the firefighter 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 rights, and when they did, her body physically sat up, her spirit responded to it for whatever reason… she got better and better every day and walked out of the hospital.”
Reflecting on how her daughter has been affected by the ordeal to this day, Spears revealed she’s doing amazing: “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.
“My biggest fear was she was going to die thinking her momma wasn’t trying to save her,” Spears concluded to her campmates.
