SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic -- Jamie Carey was so devastated she could barely get herself out of bed.

	Injuries suffered playing at Stanford made Jamie Carey think her career might be over.

A month after being forced to quit basketball at Stanford 2½ years ago following a series of concussions, her world got tragically worse. Carey's older brother committed suicide.

"It's hard for me to grasp,'' Carey said Friday as the U.S. women's basketball team prepared for the Pan American Games. "It's taught me how to fight and be a survivor. It's been tough. Eventually you have to go from the anger, the pain, the crying every day, to remembering the good things.''

After missing two college seasons, Carey was cleared to play again -- by Texas, not Stanford. So she transferred.

Carey led the Longhorns to the Final Four last season for the first time since 1987. They lost to eventual champion Connecticut. She has one year of eligibility remaining but has petitioned the NCAA for another season because she sat out two years for medical reasons. Carey expects to hear this fall whether she'll get to play the 2004-05 season.

She will earn a sociology degree in December, then begin graduate school.

Carey has come to realize her basketball career isn't everything. Josh Carey's death made that clear.

Her older brother and only sibling was 22 and studying at Colorado when he took his life. Carey had spoken to him a day before, and no one in the family knew he was having such severe problems.

"Nothing we were aware of,'' Carey said.

"Because of Josh, and my love for him, it makes me want to push harder,'' Carey said, speaking publicly about his suicide for the first time. "It changed my perspective greatly. I could get hit in the head anywhere. Why not pursue what I love and what makes me happy? That's what I did.

"If you allow yourself to learn from it, you can make a positive out of it. I open up to life, tell people I love them.''

Carey, a 5-foot-6 guard, is one of the Americans' three captains. The team met in Boston on July 17 for one practice and two exhibition games, then traveled to Cuba for three more exhibition games.

"It was very much a rush job,'' U.S. coach Debbie Ryan said. "That will be our biggest hurdle. It's very difficult to play international teams that have been practicing together so long.''

The U.S. opens the tournament Saturday morning against Cuba in preliminary round-robin play, with the top four teams advancing to the semifinals.

Carey averaged 11 points in her only season at Stanford on the way to Pac-10 Freshman of the Year honors in 2000. She is the school record holder for 3-pointers in a season with 81.

Before her sophomore season, doctors ruled her ineligible because of the concussions. She had major memory problems, forgetting where she parked her car or whether she'd paid for something with cash or check. She got dizzy going up stairs.

But she slowly became active again.

"It was difficult to watch her go through that,'' said American teammate Nicole Powell, a star forward at Stanford who never played with Carey for the Cardinal. "I didn't know her well, but she's a player who loves basketball so much that you try to put yourself in her shoes. She was facing the idea of never playing again. Her health was in danger. She's a very strong individual.''

Strong not only on the court.

"My passion for life, for basketball, for everything is a lot greater,'' she said. "That passion has stayed with me through it all.''