Swayze: 'I'm Going Through Hell'

"Yeah, I'm scared. Yeah, I'm angry. Yeah, I'm all that stuff," Patrick Swayze tells Barbara Walters in a candid interview that airs tomorrow, the first since his pancreatic cancer diagnosis. "I'm going through hell, and I've only just seen the beginning of it." Swayze was determined not only to live but to act, so for 5 months he doubled up chemotherapy with grueling 12-hour days shooting the TV series the Beast.

That meant doing without painkillers. “When you're shooting, you can't do drugs,” he says. “It takes the edge off of your brain.” He missed just a day and a half. But he has some help, not only in the form of his wife of 33 years, but a belief in the afterlife—or at least those who speak to him from the other side. “I've got a lot of guardian warriors sitting on my shoulder, including my dad, saying, ‘You just let Swayze dog know it's been his turn all this time.' And so I'm trying to shut up and let my angels speak to me, and tell me what I'm supposed to do."
(More Patrick Swayze stories.)