(Dec. 19) - A high school varsity athlete, a sturdy guy with a health history blissfully free of blips, 18-year-old Joseph Spencer had little reason to think anything was seriously wrong when he got sick last April.

The vomiting, chills, fever -- "It must be the flu," he thought.

Within hours, Spencer's fever was 104 degrees. Within days, he was in the intensive care unit at Providence Portland Medical Center in Oregon with full-blown pneumonia. Spencer's doctor was afraid this sturdy teenage boy was going to die.

"His lungs had filled up with water, it was hard to get oxygen into him," explains Dr. David Gilbert, an infectious disease expert and Spencer's physician at Providence. "Things got so bad, I thought we were at risk of losing him."