Table 3 Focus group and individual interview themes and representative quotes.

Illness Severity

"...and after church we got home, I fed him lunch, and he threw up from then until Wednesday. He couldn't hold anything down. He got so dehydrated he [husband] had to bring him in [to the ER]."

"He was just gagging and vomiting. So we were getting really concerned because he had only one wet diaper in that whole 24 hour period and he couldn't keep the ice chips down."

"Poopy diapers about every 10 minutes...vomiting...had a little bit of fever."

"[M]y husband took off work to stay with her at home, and she had two loose BMs and they were starting to get to watery... She had 11 loose stools that day. So her, I think her biggest part of this was the diarrhea and they were back to back, like 5:26, 5:40, 5:48..."

"Horrible. The vomiting wasn't that bad, because I can deal with that, but the diarrhea was awful."

"..we never had any vomiting.....she had a slight fever,....that night [next day] she had a really loose stool and a fever again.....it's continued [a week later], it's never stopped [the diarrhea].....at least 10 [number of diapers changed daily]."

Transmission

"Lysol......extra cleaning......I changed my bed probably every day because she was pooping on it.....And then everything she would touch.....I would wash her hands...".

"We had to kind of partition the house into the sick zone and the healthy zone"

"Somebody would take care of the sick kid and somebody would take care of the healthy...to prevent it from spreading"

".....you just try to do your best and sanitize everything.......with Lysol and spray down the couch and carpet. Clorox wiped off the countertop, I would spray off the door knobs, the bathrooms and I would open all the windows in the house to get fresh air in...My hands were extremely dry and raw from washing, but I knew I had to. I didn't have a choice"

"Is it airborne or what? I'm thinking it's airborne because the baby is passing it around."

"I got it the day after she got sick........I woke up with severe stomach pains.......had to go to Urgent Care.....get a shot ...to stop me from throwing up."

Emotions

Oh, man, I was horrified. I guess it's because...I know when the kidneys shut down. That was my main concern; he wasn't drinking anything, eating anything..."

"My husband was scared. He said you got to take her to the doctor now."

"And you're sitting there worried, are you doing the right thing?"

"Very, very anxious because he was so lethargic...it was very scary as a parent."

"The fever was much more elevated.........we were alarmed. We didn't know what she was going through."

"Worried about him getting dehydrated..... I was really upset because I've never seen....he just looked so pitiful vomiting."

"I was upset because seeing his little face, you didn't know what was going on with him and seeing the panic on his face. What's going on? Fix this mommy."