CHAPEL HILL
It’s a Friday night in the emergency department of UNC Hospitals. Attending physician Dr. Janet Young scrolls through her patients’ electronic records from behind one of several long, clean desks.

This part of the ED is an icebox, and Young pulls a black sweater over her patterned medical scrub shirt.

Dr. Bryan Tepper, a third-year emergency medicine resident, approaches Young with an unusual case and begins describing his patient’s symptoms.

“She says she’s itchy from the inside out,” he says.

“Runny, scratchy nose?” Young asks.

Tepper pauses, a half-skeptical, half-amazed expression on his face.

“Why did you ask me that?”

“Because it’s germane to the conversation we’re about to have,” says Young with a broad smile.

She tells Tepper that his patient likely has a virus common during the fall season that causes a diffuse rash. Then she heads over to examine the patient.

On the way, Young says that the questions she asks third-year residents like Tepper are very different from her questions to less experienced residents and medical students.

“There’s something teachable about every case,” she says. And that’s her favorite part of the job.

On this Friday night, Young oversees Team D of the ED. Team D is located down the hall and around two corners from the main ED. It’s a fairly new facility, made up of 21 private rooms each with its own stretcher, television and sliding glass doors.

“It’s a fast track area where we see lower acuity medical issues and procedures,” says Young, behind thin-rimmed black glasses.

But more serious trauma cases sometimes sneak through. In a recent incident, a car knocked an older woman to the ground, Young says. That woman ended up in Team D.

“The witnesses said she was just ‘bumped.’ She was in much worse shape when she was examined in the ED.”

Young, an emergency medicine specialist, says she’s as local as it gets. A native of Youngsville, N.C., she received her bachelor’s degree from UNC-Chapel Hill and her medical degree from East Carolina University.

She currently lives in Hillsborough with her husband and two-and-a-half-year-old son. Young, who owned a wine and beer store with her husband until last May, always knew she wanted to go into medicine, and it wasn’t difficult deciding which kind.

“I knew one of two things,” Young, 40, says. “I wanted to get into some type of trauma medicine or OB/GYN.”

Young’s somewhat atypical residency, completed in 2001, included a year in OB/GYN at the University of Tennessee followed by three years in emergency medicine at Boston University School of Medicine.

She mostly credits her love for emergency medicine to “an amazing EM rotation” during her OB/GYN residency.

Young also received extra training in emergency ultrasound during her residency and now serves as director of the ED’s emergency medicine ultrasound program.

The program provides bedside ultrasounds for extremely sick ED patients who would have difficulty leaving their rooms. Dr. Judith Tintinalli started the program about 10 years ago.

“I was trying to get emergency ultrasound started, and Janet was key to that,” said Tintinalli, the former chairman of the ED and a full-time member of the medical faculty.

“It was sort of serendipitous. She came here and had those skills, and we decided we should expand our own skills for ultrasound teaching.”

Young seems to sense when others have questions for her. Throughout the shift, she regularly asks her residents, nurses and nurse practitioners what they need and how she can help them.

At one point, she turns to the nurse practitioner sitting to her right behind the desk. The woman is 30 minutes past the end of her shift.

“What can I do to get you out of here?” Young asks.

Tintinalli, who worked closely with Young for more than five years, described Young as being very positive and very good with patients.

“There is nothing that will ever slip by her,” Tintinalli said.

Later that evening, Young sits beside a teenage girl on a stretcher. The girl says she has belly pain. Her mother sits on a chair by the foot of the stretcher and seems to hang on every word Young says.

“I don’t think it’s acute appendicitis,” Young says as she listens to the girl’s heart and lungs and then gently presses different spots on the girl’s abdomen.

“Lower pelvic pain could mean a ruptured ovarian cyst,” she says. She maintains eye contact, shifting her gaze from the girl to her mother and back to the girl again.

“It’s a normal occurrence in any woman’s menstrual cycle,” Young says.

The girl’s mother asks about a pelvic exam. Young tells her it’s not necessary but can be done if that would make them feel better. She answers a few more questions and then tells them the doctor will be back.

Young grabs a pump or two of hand sanitizer from the wall station after leaving the room and heads over to update Tepper on his patient.

Perhaps the most challenging thing for Young is finding the balance between being a good attending physician and a good mother. During her shift, her toddler Zack calls, as he does most nights. If her husband forgets to have Zack call, Young calls them.

“Hey, Zack, you ready to go night nights?”

“Did you have supper? A snack?”

“You did? You watched Thomas on the television?”

On the phone with her son, Young’s energy and enthusiasm are magnified.

“I’m raising someone to be somebody’s dad someday,” she said. “Someone who is good and decent and ethical. Those foundations form at a really young age.” Young pauses. “It changes your outlook to: ‘I need to do this right today.’”

Young says that some weeks are easier than others, but as a parent, she’s always compromising.

Right now, she and her husband are potty-training Zack.

“I was gone one week for work, and we slid way back,” she says. “If that’s not a clue that mom’s missed the balance, I don’t know what is. But you also have a lot of tries to get it right.”

Correction: This footer previously stated that this article was produced as part of J753 Reporting and Writing News. It was actually produced as part of the J560 Medical Journalism course at UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.