Anyone ever bruise a sternum before?
I t boned a car last week on my ride. I’m fine but my chest if anything has gotten worse. Very tight in the morning rolling over in bed hurts.
Daily activities I don’t notice it.
Even coughing this morning wasn’t fun.
Doctor didn’t notice anything when I got checked out and nothing visible.
Just curious how long this will last. Not really cycling related
Never had a bruised sternum, but had bruised ribs last year. It sucked.
I would suggest looking into acupuncture / dry needling for some relief. It made a significant difference for me with the ribs. I don’t buy into the holistic aspect of it, but the needles did seem to get the surrounding muscles to relax.
Interesting. Getting pins in the back sounds painful let alone the chest. 
I’ll look into though!
You barely feel the need.es going in….no big deal.
Definitely worth investigating.
Your description sounds familiar, albeit in my case the pain was more severe. I had cracked ribs. You should go to a medical professional.
I did I got checked by the EMT and then a doctor like three hours later.
I bruised my sternum a while back on an ATV, and from memory the first week or two sucked, then it slowly got better. It’s a slow healing thing though unfortunately
In a former life I wrestled competitively. I had many, many painful injuries including a bruised sternum and a tear in the cartilage attaching the sternum to the ribs. That was one of the worst injuries, in terms of pain, I ever had. Hurt to breath, hurt to lie down, hurt to get up, hurt to poop, coughing & laughing were brutal. I’ve tried to block memories of all that from my brain, but iirc, I felt it for about a month. But as I said, I also tore the cartilage. I’d guess if it’s just a bruise it’ll be about a week to 10 days before you’ll be fine.
Yes, on a few occasions unfortunately! Anything like that I normally get myself checked out by my osteopath. Quite often after an impact I find a bit of manipulation to get everything aligned speeds up the healing and/or avoids further niggles and complications down the line.
sometimes acute hairline fractures don’t show up in x-ray if they are small right away. might show up a few weeks later. CT is the best scan - but then they likely won’t do much.
a bone bruise will take weeks to a few months to heal - but that will be a deep throbbing pain right in that area.
some of the other symptoms you have likely have nothing to do with the sternum bruise. if you think about it if you hit a car that hard you’re gonna have other soft tissue damage.
MD is usually not the place to go for that secondary stuff. they have too much on their plates with other stuff. PT, chiro, osteopath, acupuncture - I’d start digging around there.