Credit: Illustration by Jamie Tufrey

I'VE NEVER SERVED, not with my gimpy arm and stiff leg, so I've never been treated by a doctor. I was delivered by a midwife and since then I've been cared for by the pharmacist at Walmart, like everybody else I know.

As a civilian employee of the Veterans Administration I have a pretty good layman's knowledge of medicine, I think, and illegal but affordable access to some drugs and antibiotics. I try to use them to keep myself healthy. As healthy as can be expected nowadays.

I've discovered that if I grind my teeth and press a finger into the fossa just below my ear I can make the chip in my head record whatever I say. Maybe it's because of my cerebral palsy. As far as I know, nobody else here at the VA has been able to do that, though it's not the kind of thing you bring up in the chow line. I've decided to use my chip to record an instruction manual for my job.

When I got this job I had to teach myself how to do everything. It's part of the VA way, of course, and has been forever. If you're the only one who knows how to do something important nobody can fire you, so record nothing. Just common sense.

These days, when losing your job most likely means a slow death by starvation or disease, it's more important than ever to cover your arse. But my days are numbered anyway, and I want to do the next guy who gets this detail a favour, so I'm going to use my chip to make a manual of Standard Operating Procedures for a Military Skin Art Archivist, Grade 5, Step 2.

Sergeant Grove is staring at the ceiling over his bed and waiting to die. I figure that thousands of veterans have spent their last hours staring at that same piece of ceiling. No way to know exactly how many, we don't keep a database to record how many vets have died in each bed. While he waits to die, Sergeant Grove mumbles constantly to himself.

He can't digest food, move his bowels, urinate, or walk, but he can still talk - if you listen closely. If he wasn't a vet he would have died a couple of decades ago. He's outlived all of his family, since they weren't vets, so he doesn't ever have visitors. There are no personal effects in the room - no family photographs, no reading glasses on the end table, no false teeth in a glass, no cane in the corner. Sergeant Grove is the only thing in the room not owned by the Veterans Administration. Sergeant Grove is owned by the Department of Defence.

I review Sergeant Grove's chart at the bedside in preparation for the interview. His real record is in a chip in his head, just like the one in my head, backed up on a database in Colorado Springs, with notes going back to his birth: results of every exam, values of every test of blood and tissue, X-ray images of his plastic knees and MRI images of his ceramic hips.

In Colorado Springs there are also frozen sections of his umbilical cord, foreskin, tonsils, wisdom teeth, nasal polyps and colon polyps, preserved samples of the shrapnel in his spine, windshield glass in his face and metal plate in his head, as well as tissue samples of the organs removed and replaced: kidneys, liver, spleen, a foot of colon, a heart valve and a couple of inches of cerebral artery.

The big red folder at his bedside holds only the paper record of this current hospitalisation and a Ziploc bag full of hair. When they shave a vet's head for brain surgery they keep some hair for the mortician, just in case. They'll need it for Sergeant Grove. His anastomosis is leaking and they've decided not to open up his skull again; they're going to let him go. That's when I show up. I was a medical records clerk for 30 years in this hospital, but 10 years ago I had enough seniority to move into a sweet detail collecting tattoos for the Military Skin Art Archive.

The last guy who had this detail kept it until he was 78, but then he couldn't climb the stairs any longer so he had to go. Anybody below GS12 can't take the elevators and as a civvie he couldn't get his knees replaced. I went to his goodbye party. A lot of people showed up because if you have more than 30 years in they give you a cake. I heard that he hung on almost a year after retirement before he died. That's pretty good and something to be proud of. Still, I'm a coward, so I don't plan to wait for retirement. I've been saving pills for years. Good ones. They won't be providing cake when I leave this job.