Jamie Lynn Spears broke down in tears as she confided in her I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! campmates about the horrific five minutes when she thought that her eldest daughter had drowned, saying at one point: "She was not alive."
The 32-year-old actress rushed to try to save her daughter Maddie, now 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.
Spears has told how she heard her mother-in-law telling her mom 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.
Wearing her heart on her sleeve, the I'm A Celebrity contestant 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, so she's like eight or nine."
Reliving the moment, she added: "My father-in-law, my mother-in-law, me and my husband, we run to jump in to save her. And you kind of think in this moment, 'This isn't real. She's gonna 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... You know logically she can't be underwater that long, nobody can live that long."
The Zoey 101 star praised her mother-in-law for calling 911 immediately before recalling the moment they could hear the sirens approaching her house. As help was on the way, Spears revealed that her daughter "was not alive".
Maddie "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 adrenaline, then I heard her [her mother-in-law] call my mum and say, 'Lynn, we've lost Maddie.'
But, thankfully, three seconds later, one of the firefighters revealed that Maddie had a pulse and they immediately airlifted her to hospital.
When Spears arrived, she found her eldest "hooked up on life support and breathing machines. But then a priest came in to read her her last rites, and when they did, her body physically sat up, her spirit responded to it for whatever reason".
The actress — who shares Maddie with 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."