pneumonia

My younger son has pneumonia but he is by far the bounciest kid with pneumonia you've ever seen and now he has no temperature and is almost back to his old self except he is pale and has trouble catching his breath sometimes.
Pneumonia is scary because it can be such a serious illness. My son has bacterial pneumonia. The way I understand it is this: Normally we all breathe in all sorts of bacteria that can make us sick and we filter those bacteria out, particularly through the nose. But sometimes we don't (this is the worrying part) and somehow we breathe in bacteria that makes it way into the lungs and to fight the bacteria the lungs fill with fluid. Normally, as our doctor told us, the lungs are like a dry sponge that fill with air and then compress but when they fill with fluid, they don't work so well.
At any rate, my son complained he was tired one day and that was unusual enough. The next couple of days, he had a slight fever and by Monday, he had a fever and was just sleeping all day. That went on for a couple of days and on the third day of the fever, we brought him in to the doctor who listened to him breathe and told us he hard some rattling, then he sent us off to get x-rays done. When they asked for more x-rays, my husband and I looked at each other: we knew it had to be pneumonia.
But even though, he apparently had a pretty large area of infection, the doctor said he was ramarkably energetic. So we've been trying to keep him quiet and not do too much. Our biggest activity this weekend was a walk around town to get ice-cream and pick up gyros. It's kind of nice having to be housebound. But the only reason it didn't drive me totally crazy is because my husband was home and he could spot me so I could go to the library and choir and a PTO meeting without feeling guilty.
If he hadn't been home and I was teaching, I guess I would have had to call in or bundle him up and bring him to school if he was well enough.
I do worry about whether my son's asthma has any link to the pneumonia and wether this will affect his lungs in the future. He's so athletic but he's always had respiratory problems. The doctor says no on both accounts but that, of course, doesn't stop me from worrying.
Here's a link to information on pneumonia from Medline http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000145.htm