Back in December of 2007 a nodule was detected on my lung. Not knowing what to think of it, I posted the images on my blog and recruited other med students to comment on the images. Here's the Way Back Machine link to the blog post.
Not to comment on your situation specifically, just some interesting related information:
The national lung screening trial [1] which had on the order of ~25k CT scan patients and ~25k radiograph patients found 96.4% and 94.5% of the positive screenings to be false positives. This screening trial has been a large motivator for computer-aided detection, diagnosis, and characterization of lung CT scans (although work on this goes back to the 80s and 90s).
If you look at the fleischner guidelines [2], the key factors in determining follow up are patient background and nodule size and growth rate. There are secondary diagnostic characteristics that are correlated with malignancy as well, e.g. spiculation and texture patterns.
Ended up being benign. I probably went a bit overboard, but did a pet scan, nothing lit up. Continued to do CT scans to monitor for growth, and it stayed the same. I was just so scared..
https://web.archive.org/web/20081205032710/http://www.runfat...