Mark Ruffalo has spoken candidly about being diagnosed with a brain tumour at the age of 33.
The Hollywood star, 56, appeared on the SmartLess podcast this week and revealed a terrifying dream made him head to the doctors to get a check up before his shock diagnosis.
“I had a brain tumour after the success of [the 2000 film] You Can Count on Me… It’s the craziest thing,” Ruffalo began.
Listen to the audio above.
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“I had one of those 4 a.m. calls and I woke up probably around 3 a.m. and I just had this crazy dream.”
“And it wasn’t like any other dream I’d ever had. It was just like, ‘You have a brain tumour.’ It wasn’t even a voice. It was just pure knowledge, ‘You have a brain tumour, and you have to deal with it immediately.'”
Ruffalo said the only symptoms he had was an ear infection, but he went to the doctors the next day.
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“I said, ‘Listen, this is going to sound crazy, but I had this dream last night that I had a brain tumour,'” he said.
Ruffalo said he went to have a scan when a mass was found.
“And she [a medical professional] 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.'”
The tumour was benign, but Ruffalo said he struggled to tell wife Sunrise Coigney, who was heavily pregnant at the time.
“When I told Sunny about it, first she thought I was joking,” Ruffalo said.
He added with a laugh: “And then she just burst into tears and said, ‘I always knew you were gonna die young.'”
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Ruffalo said that he is deaf in one year after the surgery and the left side of his face was paralysed after surgery.
He previously told The Guardian about his diagnosis, saying he tried anything and everything to get better after his surgery.
”It wasn’t like divine intervention in any way, though that’s how some people explained it to me,” he said.
“I tell you, I was so desperate to get better after my surgery that I tried everything – energy healers, acupuncture, craniosacral therapy, everything, everything. There was nothing I wouldn’t have tried.”
He told The Guardian that he was once a phone counsellor to other brain tumour sufferers after his surgery.
He added: “After the brain tumour happened, I realised I love acting, I’ve always loved it, I may never get a chance to do it again.”