RIP: Olivia Robello Breitha (1916-2006)

This is my patient identification number to this day. But I am not just a number now. I have finally regained the sense of dignity that was taken from me when I was a child. It's taken a long time for me to feel this way again. I'm glad I stuck it out.

--Olivia Robello Breitha, quoted in May 2003

Today's Los Angeles Times obituary pages bring news that Olivia Robello Breitha has died at the age of 90. Breitha wrote a book, Olivia: My Life of Exile in Kalaupapa (Arizona Memorial Museum Association 1988), about her longtime residence in Hawaii's famous colony for people with leprosy (Hansen's disease). I've got the book right here as I type this--it's really just a booklet, barely topping 100 pages, with lots of photos and a q&a appendix titled "Frequently Asked Questions About Leprosy" (a FAQ before FAQs?). But a fine booklet it is.

Breitha lived at Kalaupapa from the age of 18, when she was diagnosed and taken away to the colony, just two months before she was planning to marry (her intake image is shown above, left); until her death late last month, in a nursing care facility at Kalaupapa. Her memoir records all the minutiae of confinement; her three marriages; her surgeries; her travels after quarantine orders ended. Her advocacy work culminated last year in a Hawaiian state bill protecting the dignity of Kalaupapa's remaining residents (numbering about 30 now). (Here's the obituary from the Honolulu Advertiser, too.) There's a documentary called Olivia and Tim: Very Much Alive (1994), featuring Breitha's story combined with the story of a young man with AIDS, in which the two discuss living with a stigmatized diagnosis.