Mark Ruffalo reflected on telling his wife, Sunrise Coigney, that he was diagnosed with a brain tumor just a few days after she gave birth to their first child in 2001.
“When I told Sunny about it, at first she thought I was joking, and then she just burst into tears and said, ‘I always knew you were gonna die young,’” the “Hulk” star said on Monday’s episode of the “Smartless” podcast, adding that he “might have laughed” right after she said that.
The actor said he initially discovered the brain tumor 23 years ago when Coigney was “like nine-and-a-half months pregnant and the baby was imminently coming.”
He decided to wait to tell her until after she gave birth to their son, Keen, now 22, in June 2001.
“I was just like, ‘I can’t,’ she’s already like, ‘Oh God, him again, does everything gotta be about him?’ And so I just couldn’t,” he recalled.
The “13 Going on 30” star explained that a “week after the baby” arrived, he had to “meet the neurologist” and figure out a plan, so he “told her the night before” his appointment.
Ruffalo was diagnosed with a benign vestibular schwannoma in 2001 after he had an “intense” dream that he had a brain tumor.
“I woke up probably around 3 a.m., and I just had this crazy dream, and it wasn’t like any other dream I ever had. It was just like, you have a brain tumor, and it wasn’t even a voice it was just pure knowledge ––you have a brain tumor, and you have to deal with it immediately,” he remembered.
The Emmy award winner didn’t have any symptoms besides an ear infection, but he went to the doctor anyway where they took a CT 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.
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The tumor was benign, but he still had a surgery to remove the mass that ultimately left him deaf 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. I couldn’t even close my eye. I was talking out the side of my mouth,” he said.
The paralysis eventually went away after roughly a year, but still suffers hearing loss.
“Take my hearing, but let me keep the face and just let me be the father to these kids,” he remembered thinking.
Ruffalo, 56, and Coigney, 51, tied the knot in 2000. In addition to Keen, they share two other children together, daughters Bella, 18, and Odette, 16.
