Rinku Agrawal was working for ISRO (The Indian equivalent of NASA) when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She noticed a pain in her right side and went to ISRO in-house doctors to get checked out. She underwent a mastectomy as well as chemotherapy and radiation.

"My seniors told me I should go to the office and work to take my mind off all this treatment. At that time I was designing the hardware of a miniaturized subsystem for the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission. While this work was on, radiation dates came up so I used to go for radiation for two hours and then returned to the office."

Following her recovery, she was promoted to a big project, but had a lot of self-doubt. "There was also a lack of confidence in the work I had done during treatment and that lingering fear of whether everything had been done right or not. However, things got even better because I got the opportunity to work on the Vikram Lander which went to the Moon on the Chandrayaan-3 Mission. That also gave me satisfaction that life would go on and I wouldn’t be hindered by what I had gone through with the treatments."

Read more of Agrawal's story here.