“So much of this is just knowing what is their diagnosis, what medications are they on, what could be the root cause of this—where is their disease to begin with? There's really a lot of differential diagnosis and workup that has to be thought about, you know, when you're dealing with shortness of breath and pulmonary toxicities,” Beth Sandy, MSN, CRNP, OCN®, thoracic medical oncology nurse practitioner at the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, told Jaime Weimer, MSN, RN, AGCNS-BS, AOCNS®, manager of oncology nursing practice at ONS, during a discussion about just a few of the pulmonary toxicities oncology nurses may encounter in patients receiving pharmaceutical cancer treatments. This episode is part of a series on cancer symptom management basics; the rest are linked below.  You can earn free NCPD contact hours after listening to this episode and completing the evaluation linked below.   Music Credit: “Fireflies and Stardust” by Kevin MacLeod  Licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 3.0  Earn 0.75 contact hours of nursing continuing professional development (NCPD), which may be applied to the nursing practice, oncology nursing practice, symptom management, palliative care, supportive care, or treatment.ILNA categories, by listening to the full recording and completing an evaluation at myoutcomes.ons.org by January 19, 2026. The planners and faculty for this episode have no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies to disclose. ONS is accredited as a provider of NCPD by the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Commission on Accreditation.  Learning outcome: The learner will report an increase in knowledge of pulmonary complications from cancer treatment.   Episode Notes  Complete this evaluation for free NCPD.   Oncology Nursing Podcast Cancer Symptom Management Basics series  ONS Voice articles: Pneumonitis With Immunotherapy Treatment Hematologic Cancers Have Higher Long-Term Risk of Clots and Bleeding  Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing articles: Durvalumab Immunotherapy: Nursing Management of Immune-Related Adverse Events During the Journey of Patients With Stage III Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Heart and Lung Complications: Assessment and Prevention of Venous Thromboembolism and Cardiovascular Disease in Patients With Multiple Myeloma Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: Clinical Implications for Patients With Lung Cancer  Oncology Nursing Forum article: Multifactorial Model of Dyspnea in Patients With Cancer  ONS book: Understanding and Managing Oncologic Emergencies: A Resource for Nurses (third edition)  ONS Symptom Interventions and Guidelines™: Dyspnea  To discuss the information in this episode with other oncology nurses, visit the ONS Communities.    To find resources for creating an ONS Podcast Club in your chapter or nursing community, visit the ONS Podcast Library.  To provide feedback or otherwise reach ONS about the podcast, email pubONSVoice@ons.org.  Highlights From Today’s Episode  “Your lungs are what is needed to have the gas exchange within your bloodstream. So, when we inhale, we're inhaling oxygen, and we need that gas exchange to occur in the alveoli, which are the tiny, little bubble-like structures within the periphery of the lungs. And they're communicating with tiny, itty-bitty little blood vessels. And that's where the gas exchange occurs, where you get rid of the carbon dioxide from the blood and you get oxygen to the blood. And what ends up happening is there is, for whatever reason it may be, that gas exchange can’t occur, and that can result in so many different forms from different toxicities, whether there's an inflammation causing the alveoli not to work correctly, whether there's an obstruction where there's literally something obstructing the air getting into the lungs, or whether there's compression from an external source like a fusion or som