Chad Bettis had already won. He beat testicular cancer to return to Major League Baseball. But the show the 28-year-old Colorado Rockies pitcher put on during Monday’s 3-0 win over the Atlanta Braves was straight out of a Hollywood script.

Bettis threw seven scoreless innings in front of more than 33,000 fans.

“I don’t think I was in tune to what was going on until the fifth,” Bettis said after the game. “So many emotions. I was trying to get them under control. It was taking much longer than what was expected.”

Bettis found a lump on his testicle in November. Following surgery, doctors said he was cancer-free. However, a biopsy in the spring confirmed that the cancer had spread to his lymph nodes. So, the right-hander started nine-weeks of chemotherapy in March.

“People talk to me about it now, and I’m quick to say it wasn’t that bad. But it was,” he told Sports Illustrated. “I wasn’t prepared for it, mentally or physically. I couldn’t have been.”

In the middle of all that, Bettis and his wife, Kristina, welcomed their first child into the world.

Doctors say Bettis’s prognosis is good, and studies have shown that about 90% of people who gone through what he has make a full recovery. Bettis says that after the season he’ll launch a charity event—a golf tournament, he thinks—with Testicular Cancer Society, a group that raises awareness of the illness and its prevalence in young men.

Is there a better way to celebrate a clean bill of health than with a clean performance on the mound? We don’t think so.