It Takes A Good Cancer To Stomach Tom Ford

Putting the Tom Ford profile in New York Magazine’s cancer issue was an editorial masterstroke — so if you get disgusted by passages like:

At 45, Ford is still the only handsome male fashion designer, with perfect stubble, manicured nails, and not an ounce of fat: “When my clothes are getting tight, that’s not a sign to me that I need to go to another size — it’s a reminder that I have to stop eating, or suffer,” he explains.

. . .

“I am my own muse,” he says.

. . . you can just follow it with, you know, Rose Tisnado’s first-person account about living out her final days in a hospice:

Hospice embraced me. It’s incredible what they do. If I had money, I’d leave it to them. I called to schedule when I could come in, and they said, “No, honey, we come to you.” Before, I could barely get out of bed half the time; they gave me a fentanyl patch — that’s a pain patch — and I couldn’t believe the difference. Then my hospice doctor put me on steroids, and a day later I was eating like a horse — having fantasies about roast beef and Yorkshire pudding at three in the morning. I called my family, chattering away, and my brother said, “Rose, you sound high.” And I said, “I am!” When I’m sick, you know, I can be a cranky bitch — just roll over and want to die. But when I’m well, I feel absolutely, let’s say, cured! And to continue living my life is obviously what I would want to do. I mean, everybody would.

Or if you get nauseated (sorry, wrong word) when you see something like “‘I feel,’ [Ford] says breathily, ‘that I am keyed into the female consciousness'” just flip back to, say, Jenny Saldana’s account of surviving breast cancer:

Even now, I’ve not gotten used to seeing myself without the nipple. I used to sleep naked, and I don’t anymore. And listen — you can look at me and you’ll never know that I have a tummy tit. But I see the little differences. I see that the new breasts aren’t as full on top. Still, now I’m even more proud of my breasts; I just want to show them, and I want to see if anyone notices the difference. I want to feel normal. I miss my breast. With this one, I kind of feel like I have a turkey stapled to my chest. A month after the surgery, when they took the bandages off my breast, the scar was really raw and black — and I lost it that day. I was calling myself the Bride of Frankenboob.

I’m at the point now that I need to feel like I’m the sexiest girl alive. I’m just starting to feel like a woman again. And it’s very important to be reassured that I’m still attractive. That may sound vain, but that’s what women need.