Patrick Swayze: "I'm Going Through Hell"

Patrick Swayze, who has been battling pancreatic cancer for a year, sat down with Barbara Walters for an exclusive interview that airs Wednesday night at 10 pm on ABC. Swayze has defied the tabloids that had him at death's door when his diagnosis became public.

Swayze stars in a new show "The Beast," which he filmed while fighting his cancer, which had already spread to his liver before he was even diagnosed.

"You can bet that I'm going through hell," Swayze says to Walters. "And I've only seen the beginning of it."

"There's a lot of fear here," he adds. "There's a lot of stuff going on. Yeah, I'm scared. Yeah, I'm angry. Yeah, I'm [asking] why me. Yeah, I'm all this stuff."

As for how he figured out something was wrong, it was exactly one year ago while celebrating New Year's:

"I tried to have champagne, and it would be like pouring acid, you know, on an open wound."
Soon he found "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."

He started filming "The Beast" despite the cancer, and in 5 months of filming missed only a day and a half of work, and he never took medicine for his physical pain.

"When you're shooting, you can't do drugs," Swayze tells Walters. "I can't do Hydrocodone or Vicodin or these kinds of things that take the edge off of it, 'cause it takes the edge off of your brain."

Tune in Wednesday at 10 pm for more of the interview. "The Beast" premieres on A&E on January 15.