Woman's mission to smile again after brain tumour left her fighting to survive

A Queensland woman is proving nothing is impossible if you put your mind to it after a remarkable recovery from a brain lesion.

Tori Dent was 25 when she started to get dizzy spells.

She'd been on a cruise with friends and put it down to sea legs and exhaustion, but it only got worse.

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"(It was) bad enough that I couldn't walk unless I held a surface, or touched something. I was just mainly dizzy," Dent told A Current Affair.

The registered nurse then went to Logan Hospital in Queensland, where she worked, for a COVID-19 test.

When the COVID-19 test came back negative and her symptoms persisted, she was sent for a brain scan, where the worst was realised.

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"I had a brain tumour, lesion," she said.

After initially deeming the growth inoperable, as it started to rapidly grow Dent's doctors decided to take the risk, removing 80 per cent of the growth in surgery.

Dent survived the surgery but as she slowly recovered, her lesion started to rapidly grow again from just millimetres to more than five centimetres.

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Dent was placed in the ICU and needed a breathing tube to survive.

The once wildly independent woman had lost her ability to walk, talk or even swallow.

As she stabilised, she then had to learn to do it all again, documenting the process on social media.

Speech pathologist Sarah Raffell was brought in to help Dent find her voice again.

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"I could pick up one word every six or seven words and I think for a speech pathologist to only be able to pick up that few, shows how difficult her speech was," Raffell said.

And more importantly, Dent had to learn to swallow again.

"It's such a high-risk part of the job, however because her cognition and cognitive function was intact she knew what she could manage and what she couldn't," Raffell said.

Best friend Casey Rose spent hours, for months on end, by Dent's hospital bed, keeping their humour alive by filming TikTok videos.

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"The fact that she kept her personality through the whole experience and she was still Tori, I think that was the reassurance and kept I suppose everyone going including herself," Rose said of Dent.

After 14 months, Dent was able to be discharged from hospital, slowly walking out through an avenue of people who had supported her recovery.

Now nearly three years on, Dent still undergoes daily training and rehab.

After re-learning how to walk, talk and eat, next on her list is to learn to smile again.

"Obviously I have facial palsy and that includes the left side of my face and includes my eye. My left vocal cord does not work," Dent said.

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Dent tapes her face to tell her muscles where to go after undergoing surgery to replace the muscles in her cheek.

"I'm getting better. I don't really care what anybody else says, I know I'm getting better," she said.

Remarkably her lesion has now shrunk back down to a size smaller than what it was when it was discovered, giving doctors and Dent hope that right now, isn't forever.

"I wasn't meant to recover, but because I have the way I have, he (the doctor) expects it to continue. I love hearing that. Tell me more," Dent said.