In his first television interview since his pancreatic cancer diagnosis last year, Patrick Swayze admits he get scared.
"There's a lot of fear here," Swayze, 56, tells Barbara Walters in an ABC special airing Wednesday (10 p.m., ET.) "There's a lot of stuff going on. "Yeah, I'm scared. Yeah, I'm angry. Yeah, I'm [asking] why me," he goes on. "Yeah, I'm all this stuff. "You can bet that I'm going through hell," the actor also says. "And I've only seen the beginning of it."
He remembers when he first felt sick in late 2007. As he celebrated New Year's Eve with his wife, Lisa Niemi, "I tried to have champagne, and it would be like pouring acid, you know, on an open wound," he recalls. Soon, he says, "my indigestion issues got gigantic and constant. And then I started thinking, I'm getting skinny.
"I dropped about 20 pounds in the blink of an eye. And then when you see it in the mirror, when all of a sudden, you pull your eyes down and the bottom of your eyes go yellow and jaundice sets in -- then you know something's wrong."
Doctors found that Swayze had a malignant tumor in his midsection and a tiny mass on his liver. After a series of procedures over several days, doctors discovered that the actor had Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
"For the first few weeks, it was like being in a nightmare you couldn't wake up from," his wife, Niemi, 52, tells Walters. Swayze says his response to the diagnoses was: "'Watch me! You watch what I pull off.'"
Because his cancer had spread to his liver, having surgery to remove it was not an option. So Swayze underwent traditional chemotherapy along with the experimental drug Vatalanib.
He has lived with his cancer for a year. He credits his wife with getting him through it.
"Part of me says I couldn't have made it through without her, but, of course, the other part of me says I could have, but not nearly as elegantly as I have," says the star.
He says his illness has made him think more about the afterlife.
"I don't know what's on the other side," Swayze says. "It tests everything I believe in ... that here is something unique in all of us that does not, does not die."
He says he often thinks of his late father.
"I like to believe that 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. You just let us do the work and we'll finish it for him. And so, I'm trying to shut up and let my angels speak to me and, and tell me what I'm supposed to do," he says.
"What winning is to me is not giving up, is no matter what's thrown at me, I can take it," Swayze says. "And I can keep going."
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