Patrick Swayze finally opened about the difficulties he went through as he struggled to battle pancreatic cancer.

"How do you nurture a positive attitude when all the statistics say you’re a dead man?" Swayze told a New York Times reported.

"You go to work.”

Apparently, work was the cure in the 56-year-old actor’s case. Swayze has been working on the upcoming A&E series "The Beast" and his work on this project helped him battle the disease. When the news of the veteran actor’s illness hit the media in March, many sources gave him only a few weeks of life left.

Swayze told the New York Times that he intends to keep up his exhausting 60 hour work-week on the “The Beast,” despite the fact that he also must struggle to maintain his weight because he is on chemotherapy.

"Chemo, no matter how you cut it, is hell on wheels."

“I do find myself, at the end of the day, riding home sort of catching myself with a smile on my face,” said Swayze. “I’m proud of what I’m doing.”

The actor said that he uses “muscle-building shakes” in order to maintain his weight. Swayze is halfway through filming the first season of “Beast,” a fact that is surely relieving for the producers of the show.

Although statistics show that pancreatic cancer patients have only a 5% five year survival rate, Swayze’s physician George Fisher, who is a professor at Stanford University Cancer Center, had a more optimistic view on the actor’s condition describing it as “a very limited amount of disease” and “responding well to treatment.”

Pancreatic cancer strikes about 30,000 people a year.