re: Has anyone broken their kneecap before?

The patella is not a weight bearing bone , so yes you could walk on it, the problem is that it is a sesmoid bone enveloped in the quad tendon so each time you contract your quad it would hurt like hell.

Did it have immediate swelling?, did you land directly on the patella?

Needs to be checked out , but starting to sound like a meniscus injury

My wife broke her patella and walked on it, but she is probably much tougher than you.
She went to ortho and first X-ray showed nothing, after a week of no improvement went back and had a clear fracture line, and even when compared to original X-ray and knowing where the fracture was it could not be seen on the first one.

I stand corrected, I guess you can't always tell when it is broken. When you looked at mine it was like, "Damn, why are a couple of pieces of your patella way up there and the other pieces way down there?!"

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Fractured my patella many years ago, and could walk on it. My injury included a skin wound that I mistakenly thought was the cause of my pain. Once my skin wound started healing and the pain didn't subside I went to my orthopedic doc. Doc wasn't too happy with me because the patella had started to heal and wasn't perfectly aligned. 

Go get it checked

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Same here pretty much. I have terrible knees and used to fall with some refularity. They'd just give out on me. Anyway, I broke mine into 3 pieces. It was, of course, swollen and painful, but I was able to walk. I thought it was just a regular fall injury. Didn't find out until later that it was in pieces. It's still in pieces, but they're like connected underneath so you can separate the pieces if you push on it, but they slide back together again. It's like a clover. I'm fun at parties.

Fractured it in the first game of a doubleheader. Played the second game. Wore a cast for 8 weeks.

It's going to be a long awful process to get healed.

An Aggie can't get on his knees for 5 months? Pure torture.