August 17, 2025

Fresh Reads: Your NICU Story: Reflecting on Your Family's Experience by Mahaley Patel & Emily Souder – a conversation with Ravi Patel & Mahaley Patel

25 minutes

Some books arrive in the world because their authors have always dreamed of writing them. Others are born from heartbreak, stitched together from the pieces of a life forever altered. Your NICU Story is the latter — a tender, practical, and deeply human guide born from Ravi and Mahaley Patel’s experience of loving and losing their daughter, Saachi, after a birth injury and a NICU stay. What began as unimaginable grief became a mission: to help other parents navigate the uniquely disorienting, exhausting, and often traumatic world of the NICU — whether their child came home or not.

Co-written with therapist Emily Souder, Your NICU Story is part journal, part reflection guide, part lifeline. Structured like a workbook, it gently walks readers through five stages of the NICU journey — from those first moments in the unit, to the long days and nights by an incubator, to the complexity of going home (with or without a baby). With prompts that invite honesty, space for partners’ voices, and room to write or simply sit with memories, it offers both a tool for processing trauma and an anchor for those still feeling adrift. The book’s structure is intentional — trauma fragments memory, and these pages help knit it back together.

But Your NICU Story is more than a book; it’s an act of generosity. In sharing their own heartbreak with vulnerability and even moments of hard-won humor, the Patels have given other families permission to speak their truths. For parents, grandparents, partners, and friends touched by the NICU, it’s a reminder that healing is not linear, that small wins matter, and that love endures beyond every beeping monitor. Above all, it’s proof that even in the wake of profound loss, there is still a way to create meaning, to connect, and to honor the smallest lives in the biggest way possible.

Your NICU Story: Reflecting on Your Family's Experience by Emily Souder and Mahaley Patel: https://amzn.to/41Fx5a6

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