The final nine episodes of HBO's Sunday night hit The Sopranos feature the stuff of life. You know -- blood, guts, betrayal, angst, and cancer. It's not quite the stuff of my life, well, except for the cancer part.

Actor Vince Curatola, who plays Johnny "Sack" Sacramoni, powerfully weaves cancer into the end of this popular television drama. Diagnosed with lung cancer, his character is given three months to live -- in a prison hospital bed.

Johnny Sack says very little in the last episodes. He does gasp to his wife in episode two, "I'm very, very sick," but he lacks the lung capacity to muster up much more. He disease is considered stage four.

The cancer depictions -- one shows Johnny Sack shuffling down a long corridor in his hospital robe, oxygen tank dragging behind -- are right on, say those who've taken an early peek at the shows. And reportedly, the cancer scenes pretty accurately reflect the concerns of the larger culture -- where cancer has become an epidemic that sadly, won't come to end in nine episodes.

Last week I noted that Wal-Mart was pulling nine brands of children's clothing off store shelves in China when it was found the clothes to be contaminated with a cancer-causing dye. I posted it primarily because the Wal-Mart spokesperson in China declined comment when asked if the children's clothing had been exported to the U.S. I felt it a good idea for parents here to be on alert.

Within hours of that post, I was contacted via email by Marshall Manson of Edelman, who handles the online public affairs for Wal-Mart, sharing a statement being made by the Wal-Mart spokesperson here in the U.S. saying Wal-Mart was reasonably sure that the cancer-causing children's clothing could not have been exported from China. Because Wal-Mart was not 100 percent sure that the clothing in question had not made its way to store shelves here in the U.S., I asked Manson to contact me when Wal-Mart had finished its internal assessment of the situation. This morning, Manson emailed again. "I wanted to follow up with you and let you know definitively that none of the children's clothes in question in the story that you originally blogged about were exported to the United States. None." Wal-Mart in China has concluded its investigation into the matter and no clothing contaminated with the cancer-causing dye was shipped to the U.S. There you go, now we know for certain.

And while you might be thinking that I am receiving my information from someone who works on behalf of presenting Wal-Mart in the best possible light -- well yes I am -- but here's my thought about that. Truth never stays hidden forever, and would you want to knowingly mislead a blogger? No, I don't think so. All my gut instinct tells me Manson is being straight-forward and forth-coming with the information he has provided in this matter.