Table 4.

The emotional state of mothers carrying normocephalic children.

Category
Code	Quote
Feelings
Sadness	“I was feeling very bad, very sad”
Overwhelmed	“I felt really stressed”
Sadness	“I did not even want to eat. I did not want anybody to tell me anything, because I was tired of this…”
Fear	“I was scared”
Gratitude	“I would be happy anyway, to have my baby girl, because it was my desire, to have my baby. Daddy was so happy; he was going to have his first baby girl”
Support
Spirituality	“I went to church and they prayed for me. They told me ‘Your baby is going to be born healthy, your baby is strong, your baby is not going to have any illness’” “I was sad, but at the same time, I held on God” “I only held on my God, that I did not have Zika” “They told me ‘Well, girl, just be faithful to God, that this didn’t happen to you, just that, there are people hospitalized’ and I wasn’t”
Partner and relatives support	“I thought of my baby, and when my husband found it out, he told me ‘You are not going to work’. And was looking after me at home. My mother-in-law helped me at home because I had Zika”
Family support	“They told me to come here [to the Clinic], to tell you [doctors] that I had Zika in order to have more exams performed, my neighbor told me.”
Sources of information
By mass media	“Before pregnancy, you watched on TV that children could come with problems, that the baby comes with problems… What can I tell you? I don’t know the word, I forgot it… Well, more or less I had some idea about Zika. Because I searched […] on the internet to see how one was ill, to see how you feel [with Zika] more or less… The day I had the rash, I searched on the internet to see if it was it [Zika]. But there they said that you had joint pain, but I didn’t have it, just some mosquito bites, but nothing else…”
By healthcare professionals	“They told me [healthcare professionals] that my baby could be born with problems, that he could be born with Down syndrome” “They told me [a healthcare professional] that he/she could be born with either the head very small or very big”
By friends	“Well, the first time I heard it from a friend and told me. Because in Brazil… because at that time we did not know, so she told me that some children were born with small heads. She did not tell me the name, just that they were born with small heads due to Zika, a lot of children were born like that. But I told her that we had to wait, he had to wait in name of Jesus Christ”
Consequences on children’s health
Perception of symptoms	“I think that, as I did not have it [Zika] so strong, so deep, that there were some people with fever, diarrhea, and I did not have any of those symptoms. I just had small rash two days and that was all”
Perception of severity	“Because they said that that [Zika] happened if you were three months pregnant, that if three months or earlier, the baby could be born with problems, but as I had it when I was in my 5th month of pregnancy… Maybe because of that… [the baby is fine]”
Stigmatization of the disease	“And with Zika… imagine! Going with a deformed baby, that many people said that they were like little monsters. They told me that they were little monsters because they were born just with part of their face”