Co-Founder, Erika Conrad
Erika has been battling chronic facial pain for decades, in the forms of trigeminal neuralgia, geniculate neuralgia, and trigeminal deafferentation pain. Despite these disabling neurological conditions, she strives to contribute and to achieve excellence in all she does. She has dedicated countless hours to the TN community as a support group administrator, an artist, and a writer. In these ways, and others, she has been educating people about chronic facial pain for many years.
She created an online support group for facial pain patients who have had or are planning to have microvascular decompression surgery (MVD.) In the span of two years, the group grew to 1,000 members and became recognized as the Internet’s most comprehensive and authoritative resource for all things MVD.
Erika created a series of artwork – a study of the symmetry in nature – as an exploration of art as pain conquering meditation. The series has shown in galleries, and the prints are available online, with the all profits going to facial pain research efforts. She also created graphic t shirt designs for TN awareness. The sales of these popular t shirts raised more than $2,000 for research in a single year.
Also a budding documentarian, she debuted her first short film “Living with Trigeminal Neuralgia” on October 8, 2016.
Erika was born and raised in the mountains of western North Carolina. She lives there still with her husband John and her four children, raising chickens, ducks, and other sundry creatures.