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Your femur is your thighbone. It extends from your hip to your knee. A fracture is a crack or a break in a bone.

How does it occur?
Femur fractures, except for stress fractures, are caused by events that involve a lot of force. Because the femur is a very large bone it takes a lot of force to cause a fracture. Examples of accidents that might break the femur are falling from a height or having a high-speed collision, such as while skiing or snowmobiling.

What are the symptoms?
Symptoms of a femur fracture include:

severe pain
swelling and bruising
inability to walk
visible deformity at the site of fracture
the feeling that the bone in your thigh is moving.
When you break your femur, you may lose a lot of blood in the thigh. You may feel numbness, coldness, or tingling in your foot or lower leg if the blood supply to these areas is injured. If you lose a lot of blood, you may go into shock.

How is it treated?
Most femur fractures need to be fixed in surgery. Your leg may be placed in traction in the hospital before surgery is done.

Methods used to fix a femur fracture include surgery to insert:

steel screws
steel plates and steel screws
steel rods, which can be placed down the center of the shaft of the femur.
(Muscles are usually injured in a femur fracture, and your hip and knee commonly become stiff due to the injury and surgery.)
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:MgtoCtg9vY4J:www.medformation.com/mf/crssma.nsf/sma/sma_femurfra_sma.htm+how+does+a+femur+break%3F&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

How do fractures happen?
Bone has tough structure and is normally able to tolerate strong forces, but bones can be fractured if they suffer direct impact or if they are exposed to strong twisting or bending. This can happen as a result of a fall or collision.

The structure of bone
Bone is a living tissue, made up of cells that produce a hard, crystalline compound of mineral salts, mainly calcium phosphate. This gives the bone its strength and hardness. Increasing amounts of these minerals are deposited in bone during childhood and puberty, progressively increasing the density of bone. Maximum bone density is reached when a person is in their 30's.

Osteoporosis
From about middle-age onwards, the bones start to become less dense and more liable to fracture. Osteoporosis is a condition of brittle bones where this process is accelerated. It particularly affects women after the menopause. See the separate BUPA factsheet on osteoporosis.

[From the BUPA factsheet: The bones most likely to break as a result of osteoporosis are the hip, wrist and the vertebrae of the spine.]

Symptoms of a fracture
The most obvious symptom of a fractured bone is pain, especially on movement. There is often swelling and bruising at the site of the fracture. The fractured bone may have an abnormal bent appearance and this may be obvious. It may be impossible to move a fractured part of the body, either as a direct result of the fracture or because of the pain it causes.

Someone who has fractured a bone may be pale and clammy and experience nausea or light-headedness. This may be due to pain. When large bones, such as the pelvis or femur are fractured, there will be internal bleeding from the bone and this can cause similar symptoms.

http://hcd2.bupa.co.uk/fact_sheets/html/Fractures.html