r/lungcancer • u/Peanut-b03 • 11d ago

First appointment - any recommendations?

My mom (64F) was recently diagnosed with adenocarcinoma of the lung. We have not done a PET scan yet to determine the staging of the cancer we just know from a CT scan that there are three masses in her lung. She has both abdominal and back pain.

We were seeing a pulmonologist and have our first appointment with an oncologist tomorrow. Does anyone have anything they would recommend we ask? Is there anything I should look up beforehand?

We’re all just trying to process everything so any tips/recommendations of things to do would be appreciated. Also any tips on how to support her during this time would be appreciated as well. Thanks in advance.

Edit: We had the first appt with the oncologist and he had scheduled a liquid biopsy, brain MRI, and PET scan and is hoping to get the testing done this week and be back for an appointment next week to go over the results. Thanks to everyone who replied it definitely helped me to feel more prepared going into this.

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u/dabbler701 11d ago

Sorry you’re going through this. I don’t have any advice other than to schedule the PET, brain MRI and biopsy of the lung mass and local lymph nodes asap so they can analyze the tumor and see if there are targeted therapies which can have better outcomes than more generic treatments on cancer without targetable mutations. For instance, my Dad has an EGFR Exon 19 deletion and they’re treating that with a specific protocol. You’ll see people reference other kinds of mutations here too. You can google the most common ones if you want, but it’s probably not useful without the in depth analysis. Ours took 6 weeks to come back so this would be the top of my list.

Back pain can mean bone mets in the spine, which I think they sometimes use radiation to treat. Abdominal pain could be anything or nothing.

Wishing you and your mom the best.

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u/FlyingFalcon1954 11d ago

I had bothersome upper back pain between the shoulder blades that was not bone mets. The pain subsided as the mediastinal tumor reduced in size.

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u/Peanut-b03 11d ago

I am hoping that this is the case for my mom. Thank you!