Publish date: 2024-01-18

“The first responder got in the water just as the ATV was dragged from the pond,” Jamie Lynn Spears wrote in People’s preview of her new memoir, Things I Should Have Said. Jamie Lynn, 30, shared details of the February 2017 accident that almost took the life of her now-13-year-old daughter, Maddie. Jamie Lynn, now 30, and Maddie were at her husband Jamie Watson’s parents’ house when the young girl went for an ATV ride. The vehicle wound up submerged in a pond on the property, and the authorities were called. “[The EMT] lifted Maddie out and laid her down next to me. She was unconscious, her body distended, face swollen and eerily blue,” wrote Jamie Lynn.

The paramedic began to do CPR. “Nothing was working — not the compressions or the forced influx of air. No response,” wrote Spears. “Wordlessly the EMT grabbed her lifeless body, flipped it over and began pounding on her back. I knew what I had just witnessed. My daughter’s lifeless body. Momma was in California. I heard Ms. Holly [her husband Jamie Watson’s mother] say, “Lynne, Maddie’s not with us anymore.”

Jamie Lynn was “eviscerated” by the overwhelming “sadness” over the thought that Maddie was dead. “My baby was in the ambulance. The engine started and before I knew what was happening, the truck sped down the road. One of the firemen said, ‘They got a pulse.'” When Jamie arrived at the hospital, her daughter was “intubated and endless tubes and lines extended from every part of her.” The lead doctor said that while scans didn’t show any brain damage or injury, the girl wasn’t responding to pain or reflex tests.

The next day, Maddie was still not responding. Jamie Lynn looked over to see her husband, Jamie Watson, looking into his daughter’s open eyes. “He painstakingly raised her finger with the pulse oximeter on it and pointed the small red light at Jamie. He smiled and said, ‘E.T., phone home,'” writes Spears. Maddie held her finger with her father, who repeated the line again. “At that moment I knew she was definitely coming back to us,” wrote Spears.

Jamie spoke about the accident during a May 2020 episode of Maria Menounos’ Better Together. “We thought we lost our daughter, and in that moment, I felt everything that you can feel, as far as like, ‘This is the worst thing ever,'” she said. “There’s nothing worse than looking at your child and thinking that you failed her.”

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