Ouch, you beat me by 10 ribs. With my 4 broken ribs I started feeling pretty good after 3 weeks and started running again after 4 weeks. It hurt like hell when I started running again but I didn't feel anything moving so I gutted it out.

I suspect that your low energy levels are due to low activity levels. I'd try adding more easy/moderate activity more often (daily if possible) to build a base fitness level before going hard.

All my broken ribs were on the same side and I still had some discomfort laying on that side even a year after the break. Now at a year and a half post accident I still have some achiness when the weather changes but overall feel 100%.

Hope that helps but it's pretty much impossible to compare my level of injury with yours.

EDIT: Have you been checked recently to see if there is still a pneumothorax present?

ditto what was said above, car accident for me a long time ago, nothing like running (outdoors) to straighten out ribs/breathing issues....must break through initial pain to get the benefit of the endorphins....good luck

14 ribs sounds gnarly!! I'm still recovering from a much lighter injury but it may be insightful to your condition. I crashed on a mountain bike and landed squarely on a 4" log with all the impact on one rib. The rib snapped but there was pain in my back and in my sternum, too. Lungs were fine and I rode out for another 2 hours once I could breathe again. After 3 weeks the pain at the break site was better but I had dire pain in the cartilage near the sternum. After 6 weeks X-rays showed that the rib itself looked mended, but my pain was changed very little from the first week. Now at 10 weeks later it is finally getting better but I still have setbacks from reaching or lifting when I shouldn't be. The one thing that saved my sanity was cycling - I found that after about 3 hours of road riding it no longer hurt to breathe, and after 6-8 hours of riding I would be pain free for the evening (and wake up in my only sleep position - fetal on my good side - in the usual pain). Of course, I can't pull on the bars, flex my abs (when riding over bumps, etc.), or get out of the saddle. However, cycling was the only way I could sit in one steady position for a really long time - if I was home I'd be walking around, sitting up and lying down, and all of those things made the situation worse. The moral of the story is that rib bones should heal quickly and are held in place by lots of stuff - I've broken some of them twice, before, with 3-5 week recoveries. Cartilage, on the other hand, seems to take forever and isn't well stabilized.

Also, in my search for what could be wrong with me I found a rib specialist in Portland. If I was a little worse off I would have traveled up to get an evaluation from someone who actually understood how the body reacted to these sorts of injuries. I never found a local doc with any useful knowledge or treatment advice and I looked really hard.
http://www.ohsu.edu/xd/health/services/ ... Clinic.cfm

Good luck!

JD

I know with some injuries you get "adhesions" (strand like fibrous tissue that forms an abnormal bond between two parts of the body after trauma), they can be a source of pain. I have experienced them in muscle fascia (the thin connective tissue between muscle groups). The adhesions felt like glass or spiky chicken wire. I was pretty immobilised because I didn't get any physio. It resolved itself after a lot of progressive stretching over a period on many months. The long period of immobility, made it take all the longer to sort out.

If you check out okay physically, just work within the pain, you don't need to feel agony and it will gradually disappear. You can apply natural "Arnica" cream to alleviate the pain. Worked amazing for me.