Pas de Deux

Rousse’s athletic strength as a dancer is matched by her maternal fierceness, cranked up to a Vesuvian degree by her daughter’s illness. The nurse reconsiders. And agrees to wait until Mona says it’s time.

For the first fourteen months following her diagnosis, Mona underwent intense chemo treatments weekly, with a two-week break every six weeks. “Then we had seven months off,” says Rousse, “and we thought, ‘Woo-hoo! We can do anything, like cheer and yell and pierce our ears [Mona’s postchemo treat] and go to the dentist without antibiotics.’” Then an MRI in March 2005 showed frustrating results. “It looked like the tumors moved or grew, but the doctors said they couldn’t say how much,” says Rousse. “What do you mean you can’t calculate how much they changed? It seems lame that they can’t get exact measurements. And how do they know the slices [of MRI images] are the exact same slices they saw before?”

But there was a more troubling worry. “There’s a thing called ‘enhancement’—how alive the tumors seem, how energetic,” says Rousse. “The new MRI said the tumor enhancement had improved. That blew our world apart. We redoubled our efforts and started doing qi gong [a Chinese healing technique].” They also began a different chemo at home, under which Mona takes three pills a day, five days a week, of a newly developed drug that Rousse and Sewell have been told is better at targeting cancer cells.

Mona can’t swallow the pills with food to disguise the awful taste, so Rousse keeps her company by swallowing three huge calcium pills along with her. “We sometimes read a chapter in a book between each pill, and I just stay by her side,” says Rousse, who learned the hands-on healing technique of Reiki in order to help Mona metabolize chemo. “I do Reiki an hour before she takes her pills,” says Rousse. “I feel heat and tingling when I do it, and sometimes she says, ‘Ow, this is too much,’ but she usually likes it. I have to be really focused. I can’t have anybody, even James, in the room. It seems to help her body do what it needs to do. I just focus on helping this be a good experience for her, because if she gets sick and throws up, it’s traumatic. She stays home from school and feels bad.”

The couple was as frank as possible with their daughter from the beginning, explaining the treatment and its desired results in language she could understand. As a result, Mona can disconcert adults with her plainspoken accounting of her tumors. “Wellll . . . we’re trying to get them to shrink,” she says. “And I’m very good about taking my pills.”

Though the pills make her sick some days, “she’s doing great,” says Rousse. “It’s not making her hair fall out. She looks healthy and wonderful. She’s taking an active role in her treatment and cure. I had her watch this show on Larry King, with a girl who had brain tumors. She told James that she wanted to meet that girl. She didn’t want that two years ago. She just wanted us.”

Rousse and Sewell are the power couple of Twin Cities dance, with national and international reputations: his for innovative, highly lyrical choreography, hers for sparkling technique and breathtaking bravery as a ballerina. She’s his muse, his dance partner, his artistic director. He’s her choreographer, her collaborator, her husband. They take meetings together, market their dance company together, work with the board of James Sewell Ballet together. And they’ve tackled Mona’s illness and treatments together, just as their life’s work is gaining impressive national attention.