A tearful blonde woman holds up a smartphone to record a graduation ceremony while a young girl sits beside her and a man looks on in the background.
Backgrid / @jamielynnspears
Gossip

Jamie Lynn Spears’s 8-Year-Old Daughter Was in a Coma with a Priest Reading Her Last Rites. Then She Sat Up in Her Restraints and the Priest Said He’d Never Seen Anything Like It

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Jamie Lynn Spears was 17 when she had Maddie. She has said the two of them grew up together. So when she talks about almost losing her daughter in 2017, she’s talking about losing the person she had spent her whole adult life beside.

Maddie was 8. She was riding a Polaris ATV on the family’s Louisiana property when she took a sharp turn, flipped, and ended up trapped underwater in a pond, stuck beneath the vehicle. She was submerged for roughly 2 minutes and came out not breathing. She was airlifted to a hospital and slipped into a coma for 2 days. At the point doctors had run out of answers, a priest was called to read her last rites.

“That was the day I thought I’d lost my daughter,” Jamie Lynn told PEOPLE in the pair’s first joint interview, published June 17, 2026.

The priest arrived. Maddie sat up.

She woke from the coma and recovered completely, with no lasting effects from the accident. This week she turned 18. She graduated high school in 2026 and is headed to the University of Southern Mississippi in August to study health sciences and play softball, with plans to become a pediatrician.

Nine years later, Maddie sees the accident as something that changed her family for the better. “I feel like our faith got a lot stronger. It definitely put things into perspective,” she said. “Seeing everybody rally around me, it made me realize how blessed I am. It really made me so grateful for every day.”

Two blonde women stand together in front of a black curtain; the taller one wears a gold graduation gown with medals and a pink plaid dress, the other wears a red dress.
A proud Jamie Lynn Spears poses with graduate Maddie, who wears a gold graduation gown and honors medals, backstage after the high school ceremony.

She put it simply: “In the end, I think such a negative experience affected us positively.”

Her mother put it another way: “We were given a miracle, and I don’t take it for granted.”

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A tearful blonde woman holds up a smartphone to record a graduation ceremony while a young girl sits beside her and a man looks on in the background.
Backgrid @jamielynnspears
Two blonde women stand together in front of a black curtain; the taller one wears a gold graduation gown with medals and a pink plaid dress, the other wears a red dress.
A proud Jamie Lynn Spears poses with graduate Maddie, who wears a gold graduation gown and honors medals, backstage after the high school ceremony.

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About the author

Nadia Santiago

Nadia Santiago is a writer who lives between the clouds and the coastline, and writes about all the things your heart knows but your mouth can never quite say.