I'm currently recovering from an
atypical pneumonia caused by your friend and mine, the lowly
mycoplasma, so I figured I'd take the opportunity to add what I've learned from my doctor.
Unlike bacterial pneumonia, which shows up in a chest x-ray as an opaque blob, usually affecting an entire lobe of one lung, mycoplasma pneumonia is characterized by the appearance of a network of threads in the chest x-ray. In my case, they spread throughout most of my right lung, but I'm told the infection is generally confined to one lobe. (I started getting sick around the start of midterms and waited it out for two and a half weeks before seeing a doctor. Not the best move - go see a doctor after a week of coughing, especially if it wakes you up at night.) Since I'm young and in good physical condition, the infection posed no serious threat, but it's not really any sort of joke either.
Symptoms include a persistent cough, often accompanied by a fever and/or headache; swelling of lymph nodes and inflammation of the eardrums may also occur. Patients often wake up at night as a result of either fever or cough. If you cough up mucus and see flecks or threads of bright red blood, that's a sign of pneumonia. As with any persistent infection, your immune system will be working overtime, and you will feel tired and lethargic no matter how much you sleep. I had difficulty concentrating, and I'm told that's not uncommon.
Treatment is simple, and generally consists of a course of antibiotic therapy - in my case it was Zithromax (azithromycin), which is nice because it's only one pill a day, and you only have to take it for five days. What's not nice about azithromycin is that it gave me the shits something fierce, but that's not supposed to be terribly common. Unfortunately, while the therapy only lasts five days, the aftereffects of the infection persist much longer. I will be coughing for about a month after going off antibiotics, and I won't be back to full lung capacity for about 6 weeks - that's how long it takes to clear all the crap out of your lungs. You can speed recovery by taking a few very deep breaths every 10 minutes - this gets air into all the lung spaces and apparently promotes blood flow and healing of the tissue. Or, you can recover faster by not waiting two and a half weeks to see a doctor. That would be my vote. One week, ladies and gentlemen, and if you're still coughing, go get it taken care of ASAP.