The Pathology Report...

The final pathology report says, "poorly differentiated non-small cell lung carcinoma". The NSCLC I already understand, but I wasn't initially sure if "poorly differentiated" was good or bad.  I found out that  "differentiated" means when you can tell the type of original cells that have become cancerous. "Well-differentiated" means that they look very much like their host cells (lung, liver, heart muscle, brain, etc). "Poorly differentiated" cells means that they've mutated in such a variety of ways that they look chaotic and untraceable. This also makes it essentially impossible to be able to tell what sub-type of NSCLC you have to deal with. The three major types are adenocarcinoma (the most common in women non-smokers), squamous cell carcinoma, and large cell carcinoma.  Sometimes the cancer isn't sub-typed because it just can't be (it is so "poorly differentiated") and sometimes not enough tissue was collected during the biopsy. We've been assured there was plenty of tumor tissue for the labs, so they'll have to treat it as "generic" NSCLC. This isn't preferable, but it's not uncommon. All three subtypes are treated similarly, though not necessarily identically.