Mark Ruffalo has opened up about why he initially waited to tell his wife about his brain tumor diagnosis.
The 56-year-old actor candidly spoke about the terrifying diagnosis and how it impacted his family on Jason Bateman, Sean Haynes, and Will Arnett's Smartless podcast - which aired on Monday (January 22).
After the success of Ruffalo's film, You Can Count on Me (2001), he discovered that he was suffering from a benign vestibular schwannoma - which shockingly first came to him in a "crazy" dream.
"It wasn't like any other dream I'd ever had. It was just like, 'You have a brain tumor,'" he told the podcast hosts. "It wasn't even a voice. It was just pure knowledge, 'You have a brain tumor, and you have to deal with it immediately.'"
At the time, the only symptom the Hulk star - who was 33 at the time - had was an ear infection but the dream instilled a "sense of doom" in him so he asked doctors if he could get a CAT scan.
"The nurse calls the doctor up, I could hear them talking in the other room. She comes in, she’s kinda like 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,'" he said.
Thankfully, the tumor was benign and the Avengers star was told it was operable. However, Ruffalo refused to tell his wife, Sunrise Coigney, as she was pregnant and days away from giving birth to their first child, son Keen, now 22.
"Sunrise was, like, nine and a half months pregnant, and the baby was imminently coming," he recalled. "I couldn't tell Sunny. She had the birth plan, she did the yoga, she had the doula."
According to the 13 Going on 30 star, it wasn't until a week after his son was born that he went back to the neurologist to get the mass removed. He also shared that right before that procedure, he revealed the diagnosis to his wife.
"When I told Sunny about it, first she thought I was joking," he said on the show. "And then she just burst into tears and said, 'I always knew you were gonna die young.'"
Ruffalo was informed when he went to get the benign tumor surgically removed that there was a 20% chance of "killing" the nerve on the left side of his face, and a 70% chance of losing the hearing in his left ear.
"[I am] completely deaf in one ear, and when I woke up, the left side of my face was totally paralyzed," he said of the surgery’s aftermath. "I couldn’t even close my eye. I was talking out the side of my mouth."
The paralysis eventually went away a year later, however, the actor still suffers from hearing loss today, adding: "Take my hearing, but let me keep the face and just let me be the father to these kids."
Ruffalo and Coigney later welcomed two more children, daughters Bella Noche, 18, and Odette, 16.