Yes, this partThey said there were nodes in his lungs, but that they werent treating and just want to keep an eye on until mid December, then talk about what to do if they grow. The problem is, he is weak and is having trouble breathing.doesn't sound good at all. Sounds like his metastases are growing pretty fast when he's already noticing bulging from lymph nodes and trouble breathing from lung metastases. But we don't really have enough information to make this determination right now. Missing information:The exact histopathology (is it clear cell renal cell carcinoma or something more exotic?)Imaging reportsThe date of imaging and surgery to get a feeling for the timeline and progression dynamicsWhy his treating physicians said that "his body encapsulated the tumor" when they also said he has lung metastases, and why they didn't indicate systemic therapy and why they seemed to think his prognosis is good.Taking the most likely case based on incomplete information: In metastatic classic clear cell renal cell carcinoma, no chemotherapy is indicated ever, because chemotherapeutic agents don't help, which has been tried and demonstrated over and over. Effective medications are immunotherapy (checkpoint inhibitor antibodies like pembrolizumab), TKIs (tyrosin kinase inhibitors that can be taken orally, like sunitinib, pazopanib, cabozantinib or axitinib) and as probably less effective alternatives medications that inhibit vascular growth (e.g. bevacizumab or lenvatinib) or mTOR-inhibitors (e.g. temsirolimus).What's indicated precipitates on your husband's other medications, comorbidities, performance status (overall health) and other stuff.Also, in oligometastatic renal cell carcinoma, locally ablative therapies can be used to kill all the metastases you can detect at the moment, for example radiosurgery, microwave ablation etc., but your husband's case doesn't sound like that from the very limited information we got.Edit: As /u/Porencephaly already wrote, your next step is to contact his oncologist's office. They need to determine what the problem is right now (maybe it's even an infection and not metastatic progression) probably with new CT imaging and formulate a plan of action.His trouble breathing could be due to anemia, or a number of infections, or heart problems, or lymph node metastases compressing blood vessels or a bronchus, or pleural effusion, or whatever else... this is all more probable than trouble breathing due to lung metastases themselves, which surpisingly rarely are symptomatic in this way.
That doesnt sound good.