During a raquetball game, I fell forward landing on my palm up hand while my fingers caught on the floor and hyper-extended under my hand and body weight. I thought I broke many of them.

It was diagnosed as a severe sprain, x-ray shows no broken bones. It's across 3 fingers (middle, ring, pinky). When it happened, I was told it should be better in a week to 10 days. It wasn't. I thought maybe since it was severe, I would need additional time to heal.

After 5 weeks, I went to a different doctor (I happened to be out of state). He concurred the severe sprain diagnosis and recommended physical therapy to get movement back to the finger joints.

I live in a remote area (2 hours to nearest hospital/medical facilities) of Alaska so physical therapy isn't an option, so he had me meet with a therapist once and she gave me a "home therapy" program to follow. Unfortunately, my fingers still are quite swollen, so I'm not sure if I should be doing these movements. I am to try & force my fingers/tips into a closed fist. Currently, they will not go into such a position and the joints are swollen enough still that they won't close into a fist. They're also still quite painful, especially after trying to force them into positions they can't go into due to the swelling. I am fearful that with them still swollen I am

I would appreciate any advice on what I should do. Do I just keep trying to exercise the fingers and hope in time the swelling will go down so I can make a fist with that hand again? Do I go get an MRI done so they can determine if there is more damage than originally (twice) thought? I can move all my finger joints, it's just the range of motion is severely limited (on the ring finger) and limited on the other two.

The therapist also gave me a type of splint to force my ring finger to go back to straight. If I wear it for any length of time (more than 5 minutes) and remove it, it is very painful trying to get back to the "half-way fist" that I used to be able to achieve.

The article at http://www.eorthopod.com/public/comment/reply/6566# is unclear (to me) as to when I should start therapy to improve movement. The fingers don't appear to be able to move (due to the swelling still present after 5 weeks since injury) to the positions I need to get them into (closed fist) working towards therapy. Is the working and pushing them harder now (quite painful, btw) towards closing what I actually need to be doing to speed/help healing? I hate to think that the strain and pain I'm putting myself through now is actually causing more injury/harm than good.