Symptoms:

The most common symptoms of pneumonia are:

• Cough (with some pneumonias you may cough up greenish or yellow mucus, or even bloody mucus)
• Fever, which may be mild or high
• Shaking chills
• Shortness of breath (may only occur when you climb stairs)

Other symptoms include:

• Confusion, especially in older people
• Excess sweating and clammy skin
• Headache
• Loss of appetite, low energy, and fatigue
• Sharp or stabbing chest pain that gets worse when you breathe deeply or cough

Signs and tests:

If you have pneumonia, you may be working hard to breathe, or breathing fast.

The health care provider will hear crackles when listening to your chest with a stethoscope. Other abnormal breathing sounds may also be heard through the stethoscope or via percussion (tapping on your chest wall).

The health care provider will likely order a chest x-ray if pneumonia is suspected.

Some patients may need other tests, including:

• Arterial blood gases to see if enough oxygen is getting into your blood from the lungs
• CBC to check white blood cell count
• CT scan of the chest
• Gram's stain and culture of your sputum to look for the bacteria or virus that is causing your symptoms
• Pleural fluid culture if there is fluid in the space around the lungs