Five Foot Two and Showing Fibromyalgia as it really is.

When Lady Gaga released her documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two, I tuned in. I’ve always liked her, so I probably would have tuned in at some point anyway, but there was something specific I wanted to see.

A week before the documentary hit Netflix, Gaga announced that she had fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition that I too have. Naturally, I wondered how her condition would be shown, and I, like many people had a few, quite small, concerns, if they could even be called that. The condition is misunderstood, and I’d already seen that prior to the documentary’s release people had been asked, ‘well if she can do that, why can’t you just get out of bed?’

This question was probably quietened by her having to cancel part of her tour due to the pain.

 In Five Foot Two, she also addresses the issue of access to help for people with chronic illness, something many people were talking about prior to the release. There were people who believed that her fame, her wealth, or how long she’d had the condition for meant that she was somehow not worthy of sharing her story and being the celebrity who stood for people with this condition. I disagree; I don’t think we could have got anyone better. She got more people talking about this condition in a matter of days than I had seen in the whole decade I’ve suffered with it.

She addresses that she is lucky enough to have a team of people around her to help her, and can afford good medical care, and that she doesn’t know what she would do without it. Yet despite this, she still suffers. The condition is unpredictable, relentless, and difficult to treat and it doesn’t matter who you are; if you have a chronic illness, you will suffer.

I found the way that the illness was depicted in the documentary was great. It was true to life. Five Foot Two is about her career, not her condition, but the condition is constantly seeping into her everyday life. During rehearsals she has to stop and get her hip treated, and we see her having injections to control the pain.

When you are ill, it is as much a normal part of your day to day life as eating or sleeping. Sometimes it is possible to push through the pain and try to live a semi normal life, but doing so does not mean that you aren’t in pain. Gaga addresses this herself when talking to her doctor; when she performs she is pushing through the pain, and generally being helped by the adrenaline, but still in pain.

Other times it is not possible to do this, and Gaga invites us to witness a fairly intimate and vulnerable moment during a pain flare. She lies on a sofa, crying, and has a team of people working on her. Moments where the pain leaves us like this are ones that most of us deliberately hide due to embarrassment. Gaga shares this common fear, but lets us in regardless, and I think that it really important.

This is the side chronic pain patients rarely show to the outside world, because it is scary to do so, but this is the side that people need to see.