"There was a gunshot.  I heard it, I felt a stinging in my leg," Kelly Mulqueeny says, talking about the night she was shot and pistol-whipped in a street mugging three months ago.

"There was blood everywhere on the sidewalk, and then I realized the stinging was a bullet wound in my leg," Kelly tells INSIDE EDITION.

Incredibly, though, Kelly has reason to be grateful for her nightmare brush with crime.  Emergency-room doctors working on Kelly's gunshot wound discovered she had a previously undiagnosed tumor, a cancer that Kelly had never even suspected.

"I believe it was definitely somebody knocking and saying, you have to get this checked out," Kelly says.

The shooting happened around midnight in a trendy Chicago neighborhood.

38-year-old Kelly was talking to a friend on the sidewalk when two muggers attacked and Kelly was shot in her upper thigh.

Kelly has a scar on her forehead from the pistol whipping, but the gunshot wound has largely healed.

Now she's being treated for the ovarian cancer.

"If she hadn't been diagnosed and treated, her cancer might have progressed to the point that treatment was not possible.  She may have been too sick," says Kelly's oncologist, Dr. Sybilann Williams.

Kelly is not out of the woods yet...she has just started grueling chemotherapy along with holistic care at Cancer Treatment Centers of America.  She also had a hysterectomy.

But Dr. Williams says she is very hopeful.

Kelly's spirits were boosted when her friends staged a fundraiser at a local nightclub.  And she says being shot in the thigh seems like no big deal now: "A couple of scars on the leg just to get me going with this treatment is not so bad."

For more on Kelly's story or to contribute, visit: http://b2b911.org/kellym.html.