How To Tell If Your Ankle Is Broken

The Only Symptom of a Broken Ankle

To get symptoms out of the way, you should know that a broken ankle has a specific pain.

Signs

The only sure-fire way to know if any bone is broken is by seeing the actual broken bone. That’s the sign, the one that clears up any doubt.

You definitely can see if a bone is broken by looking at it directly with the naked eye, but there’s usually a bunch of pesky flesh and blood in the way. Usually, you need to use an X-ray to see a broken bone.

Of course, when the broken ends of a femur are sticking out of your thigh, it’s pretty much a dead giveaway. Barring either a really nasty compound fracture—or a creepy zombie style cutaway just to get a look—you’ll need that X-ray.

At the end, I’ll show you what a broken ankle can look like on an X-ray (albeit, in this case, with a really tiny fracture). For now, let’s concentrate on the signs of a broken ankle we usually can see, and we’ll start with deformity.

Bruising or discoloration is from blood. Usually, blood is contained in the blood vessels (arteries and veins). After an injury, blood leaks out of the blood vessels and pools in the flesh and muscle, where you can see it.

There’s one more sign commonly associated with broken bones: crepitus. This one is harder to imagine. It can’t be seen, but it can be felt. It’s the broken bits of bone grinding on each other with movement or manipulation of the injury. To the person feeling for it, it can be described as a bag of gravel. Not fun.