Mark Ruffalo says that he had a warning dream that urged him to get help for an undiagnosed brain tumour.
The Marvel actor, 56, recalled that the freaky premonition, which evenutally led to an actual diagnosis, came just "after the success of You Can Count on Me", which came out in 2000.
Speaking to Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes on their podcast, SmartLess, Ruffalo explained: "I had one of those 4am calls, and I woke up probably around 3am, and I just had this crazy dream. It wasn’t like any other dream I’d ever had. It was just like, 'You have a brain tumour'," he explained.
"It wasn’t even a voice. It was just pure knowledge, 'You have a brain tumour, and you have to deal with it immediately'."
Noting that while he didn’t have symptoms of the brain tumour at the time, he said he still had "an ear infection that night" that was hurting. Spooked by his dream, he decided to speak to the doctor on the set of one of his movies about his health.
"I said 'Listen, this is going to sound crazy, but I had this dream last night that I had a brain tumour'," 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'."
Despite the doctor joking about him being "crazy" for wanting to get checked out after the dream, nobody was laughing following the results of the scan.
"[The doctor] comes in, and she kind of looks like a zombie," he continued. "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'."
Thankfully, the tumour turned out to be benign and was removed, but to this day he is "completely deaf in one ear" as a result of the surgery.
The Poor Things star also said that after he woke up from the procedure, the left side of his face was "totally paralysed" and he couldn’t even close one of his eyes.
"[The doctors] said I had a 20 per cent of nicking my nerve on the left side of my face, and killing it," he explained. "And then I have a 70 per cent chance of losing my hearing, which went."
Ruffalo said his main focus at this time was staying a live for his family, adding: "Take my hearing, but let me keep the face, and just let me be the father of these kids."
