Can I just get the first item in a Cursor object (pymongo)?

.find_one() would return you a single document matching the criteria:

cdb[collection].find_one(query_commands_here)

Note that the PyMongo Cursor does not have a hasNext() method. What I would do is to call cursor.next() and handle the StopIteration exception:

try:
    record = cursor.next()
except StopIteration:
    print("Empty cursor!")

You can also do the following (without having to handle the StopIteration exception):

cur = cdb[collection].find(query_commands_here)
record = next(cur, None)
if record:
    # Do your thing

This works because python's built in next() will return the default value when it hits the end of the iterator.