McDonald & Dodds star Jason Watkins previously shared his horror after finding his two-year-old daughter Maude dead in her cot.
Maude died from sepsis on New Year’s Day in 2011, after developing a chest infection.
Maude’s illness
Jason and his wife Clara Francis – also parents to Bessie and Gilbert – had taken Maude to A&E after medication given by her GP failed to work. The parents were told she had a bad cold and croup. They were then discharged.
However, Maude died later that night at home. And her parents only discovered that she’d had sepsis after her death.
Sepsis is a life-threatening reaction to an infection that occurs when the immune system overreacts and starts to damage the body’s own tissues and organs.
Jason Watkins on death of daughter Maude
Earlier this year, Jason spoke about the moment he realised Maude had died. He told Andy Coulson’s podcast Crisis What Crisis? that his other daughter Bessie, who was four at the time, had come into his room.
He said: “I woke up and Bessie came in, she was four at the time. She said: ‘Oh I can’t wake Maude.’ I had this really weird feeling that something was very wrong. And maybe sort of slow-motion started then, getting up and there was a feeling of dread, I remember this feeling of dread, but that everything was going to be alright, you know, it’s fine.
“I walked into the bedroom and I could see the cot ahead of me and I could see that she was, I knew she was dead. She had blood coming out of her nose and her mouth.”
He continued: “Cataclysmic. And then everyone was crying and wailing and it was horrendous. You can’t believe it’s happening, and you want time to go backwards, you think this isn’t happening, this isn’t happening.”
‘We couldn’t revive her’
The actor said he tried to revive Maude with CPR on the living room floor, as they waited for the ambulance to arrive.
He added: “You just want time to go back. You think no, this isn’t right, this hasn’t happened, this is wrong. But then the ambulance arrived and they tried to revive her and then we were told by one of the doctors that that was it, we couldn’t revive her and she had died.”
McDonald & Dodds is on ITV1 at 9pm on Sunday July 28.
Read more: Jason Watkins in profile – death of daughter, winning a BAFTA and end of first marriage
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