Table 2 Identified themes and direct quotes from participants

Theme: Cues/triggers/alerts

“It’s a mental cue. You walk past a water fountain, a bathroom, you know, anything that correlates with going, like a flow.”

“It’s almost like I think, OK, I’m going to be busy for an hour, now perhaps I should go to the bathroom now, when I see one.”

“Oh, WOW! I just have kind of a pressure kind of feeling. You know, and it’ll start off small, and if you wait too long then it’s a real pressure and you feel like you have to really hurry.”

“And running water. Yeah, that’s when it— and somebody else have to go, then you say, I better go too. [Chuckling] Running water (make it come down?) too.”

Theme: Cleanliness matters

“No, I was just going to say about, you didn’t mention this, but when you sit on the toilet like that you can get an infection.”

“I don’t have any problem, long as the bathroom is there, I have to go, use.”

“ If I see what the position the bathroom is, most of the time I don’t want to sit down because if the bathroom is not really clean, yeah, I just have to be very careful. Some places they put the paper, you know, the one you can put and cover it—”

“—it’s the cleanliness of it. But here’s a thought I had, I’ve thought about this, I thought, if you’re sitting on the seat, I wonder how many germs, really, from the last person, or how long those germs survive on the seat.”

“I was taught that [to hover], but my, since my legs got so bad, I can’t do that standing up and squat. So I have to pad it” (i.e., the toilet seat), “I pad it all around it, and I sit to the edge.”

“Oh, I do that, because I have company and every now and then I will go up there and spray and wipe. Especially if there’s a lot of folks.”

Theme: Toileting as an irritant and nuisance

“I find having to go to the bathroom a pain in the neck. I find it like, Oh, god, I’ve got to go to the bathroom!”

“Sometimes on days when I’m like super hydrated and I feel like I’m going to the bathroom more often and it’s kind of, it’s kind of a pain in the rear end, I will, when I finish I like, Oh, I feel good, I feel better, I wish that would last longer.”

“I think it was that. I think it was a lot of that. Just enough to take the pressure off to then to get on to the next thing.”

“… I don’t feel like I have to empty all the way, just enough to where you feel like it’s going to stop and you’re good.”

Theme: Situational awareness

“Oh, I would almost probably always stalk out where the bathroom was. Always.”

“—there’s certain toilets I will not use. One is in an airplane. Unless it’s absolutely necessary. I will hold it for hours before I will—and I’m bad about that.”

“Or if I hear somebody and it feels like they’re—sounds like they’re pouring a five gallon bucket, I’m like, Good lord, how much did you drink? I perceive other people, I have noticed other people going, so I worry that they are paying attention to me—which they probably aren’t.”

“You don’t, you know, you lose all sense of kind of modesty when you have to, you just got to go. You’ve got to go. But, yeah, depending on the place, too, whether it’s a crouch or a hover.”

“So when I was talking about worrying about what people think, it’s when I’m at work and I know that there’s a coworker in the bathroom.”

“there’s certain toilets I will not use. One is in an airplane. Unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

“You just excuse yourself from the situation, and go do what you need to do. Because a lot of times you don’t want people to know”, “God, she’s going to pee how many times now?”