Mark Ruffalo had a ‘crazy dream’ that caused him to go to doctor and led to shocking results.
Over 20 years ago, when his wife Sunrise Coigney was pregnant with their son Keen, the Marvel actor dreamt he had a brain tumour. And unfortunately, that health scare ended up being reality.
During an appearance on Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett’s Smartless podcast, Ruffalo explained that he had about a week left filming The Last Castle.
But he woke up one day from ‘this crazy dream’ that was unlike ‘any other dream’ he had ever had.
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“It was just like, ‘You have a brain tumour’ It wasn’t even a voice,” Ruffalo recalled. “It was just pure knowledge: ‘You have a brain tumour, and you have to deal with it immediately.’”
The Bruce Banner actor didn’t have any symptoms at the time but did point out that he had an ‘ear infection that night’ that had been causing him some discomfort.
So, he decided to go to see a doctor working on set anyway, just in case, and ended up being sent for a scan.
"I said 'Listen, this is going to sound crazy, but I had this dream last night that I had a brain tumor'," he said.
"[The doctor] said 'That is crazy. But there’s no reason that you should have to worry about it. I’ll order you a CAT scan, and we’ll go after work today'."
That scan proved to have shocking results, as Ruffalo recalled the appointment: “The nurse calls the doctor out, and I could hear them talking in the other room, and she just comes in, and she’s a zombie.
“And she says, ‘You have a mass behind your left ear the size of a golf ball, and we don’t know what it is. We can’t tell until it’s biopsied.’”
With Ruffalo’s wife due to give birth, he decided to hold off telling her, and waited until about a week after Keen was born.
“When I told Sunny about it, first she thought I was joking,” the actor said. “And then she just burst into tears and said, ‘I always knew you were gonna die young.’”
Fortunately, his tumour turned out to be benign, and he underwent a surgery to remove it.
Ruffalo awoke from this completely deaf in one ear, which is still the case for him to this day.
He initially suffered facial paralysis on the left side but this eventually resolved within a year.
“Take my hearing, but let me keep the face and just let me be the father to these kids,” the star recalled thinking.
Jess Battison