Steve,

That's fairly normal.

The best thing I found was prescription strength IBUPROFEN. All that means is 800-1000 mg dose which you can simply take without a prescription. The downside with any antiinflammatory drug is liver damage with long term use. Hopefully your hand will mend soon so you will not need to take anything.

Also, as with the heat the PT uses before therapy, my doc suggested warm water in a bowl at home *before* you do your exercises. Not more than 10 minutes. Actually, you can start the exercises with your hand in the water. Good luck.

Mike,
Do you have a night-time splint? Are you keeping hand moist 24/7? Get into the habit of flexing hand all day. Also what really works, and has been mentioned by many, is to use an ace bandage or elastic bandage to wrap around fist for 10 minutes at a time. This gently forces fingers to a fist like position. It was the sigle thing I did to combat stiffness. Each day I could feel progress. It wasn't long until I could make a fist easily. Now fingers and hand are like they were before DD.

Wrapping my hand was also the best thing I did. I do it about 4 or 5 times a day for 20 minutes. I think this helped more than the silly putty.

I used the 1" coban also. It is an elastic wrap that can be used over and over. If I remember correctly, I would cut a piece about 9" long and then wrap it around my fist. It will stick together where it overlaps so would be like a 1" wide rubber band. This would hold my fist tight. As the swelling goes down and the flexibility gets better you would make it smaller/tighter. I would put this on my fingers as often as I would think about it (for about a 10 minutes). I would carry it with me during the day an slip it on occasionally. The more often, the better. You want to place it so that it puts pressure on the affected fingers. The purpose is to break down any scar tissue. Hope this makes sense, it really worked for me.