Mark Ruffalo opened up on his decision to temporarily hide his shocking brain tumor diagnosis from his wife on his Monday, January 22, appearance on the "SmartLess" podcast.
The Marvel actor, who was 33 at the time, had a tumor the size of a golf ball on the left side of his head that left him "completely" deaf in one ear.
"I woke up probably around 3 a.m. and I just had this crazy dream," the actor explained of how he discovered the health condition. "And it wasn’t like any other dream I’d ever had. It was just like, ‘You have a brain tumor.’ It wasn’t even a voice. It was just pure knowledge, 'You have a brain tumor, and you have to deal with it immediately.'"
The 13 Going on 30 star quickly went to the doctor and told them about the unsettling dream, admitting he knew it sounded "crazy" but he wanted them to run tests anyway.
"She comes in and she’s just kind of, like, a zombie. And she says, ‘You have a mass behind your left ear the size of a golf ball. We don’t know what it is, we can’t tell until it’s biopsied,'" he recalled being told.
At the time, his wife, Sunrise Coigney, was pregnant and nearly full-term with eldest child, Keen, now 22, noting that when he found out, "the baby was imminently coming." Ruffalo made the decision to wait until a week after their baby was born to break the news.
"When I told Sunny about it, first she thought I was joking," he continued. "And then she just burst into tears and said, 'I always knew you were gonna die young.'"
Despite Coigney's fears, the tumor turned out to be benign, however, the surgery to remove it did come with serious consequences.
"When I woke up, the left side of my face was totally paralyzed, like I couldn’t even close my eye," the Now You See Me star shared. "They said to me I had like, I had a 20% chance of nicking my nerve on the left side of my face and killing it and then I had a 70% chance of losing my hearing, which went."
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Ruffalo — who also has daughters Bella, 18, and Odette, 16, with Coigney — confessed he was okay with this trade in the end.
"Take my hearing," he said. "But let me keep the face and just let me be the father of these kids."
