4. Pain While Breathing
Pain at the initial fracture site isn’t the only way and place that you can experience pain if you have fractured a rib. You are also likely to experience added pain when moving or breathing as a result of the expansion of the ribcage – and this can also be dangerous for the injury because of the fact that the ribs can move, displace, or poke into things that they aren’t supposed to.
If you experience pain while breathing, get to the emergency room immediately. Sometimes difficulty breathing might signal that the rib fracture is worse than initially thought, and it puts you in automatically more danger because of the fact that fractures can poke through on the inside (and remain unseen from the outside). X-rays are the first step to establish the extent of the injury and what should be done next in order to help the injury to heal.