Welcome to Mayo Connect @overthehillsb, I'm sorry to hear that you are facing this finding, and congrats of quitting smoking! IF it is cancer, it is still early, screening is working!, and it sounds like you have the appropriate appointment scheduled soon with a pulmonologist. That's good! Try to take a pause, and not get ahead of yourself. We don't know that it's cancer. There are many people with non-cancerous lung nodules. I have stage IV lung cancer, but also have a 1 cm lung nodule from a fungus. It happens.
While our first instinct is to run to surgery to get it out, that's not always the best approach. Surgery comes with pain, sometimes lifelong nerve pain. I hear of many doctors that want to wait until the nodule is 1 cm before doing a biopsy. That's not unusual. If they insist that you wait, they'll likely do another scan in 3 months.
Biopsies are highly dependent on the location of the nodule, and the overall health of the patient. Over the past four years, I've had a handful of bronchoscopies (down the throat), that I tolerated with minimal side effects.
They may also want to do a PET scan. The nodule may light up more on the PET scan if it is cancer versus some other inflammation or infection. That's not always true of very small nodules either.
You haven't been sick recently, no covid or other lung infections?