WFAA’s John McCaa out after jaw surgery (update)

(UPDATED below with additional comments from McCaa.)

John McCaa, the erudite longtime anchor for WFAA/Channel 8, isn’t so erudite at the moment as he recovers from a hairline jaw fracture.

“This past Wednesday, I developed a hair-line jaw fracture,” McCaa wrote Dec. 26 on his Facebook page. “Spent a couple of days at Baylor Med Center (the big one downtown) after being transferred from Baylor in Irving. .... I must tell you I have never in my life experienced any pain remotely close to that.”

McCaa, who has been with WFAA since 1984, wrote that after jaw surgery on Christmas Eve, he still had swelling as well a stitches and numbness that might take a few days to go away.

“My wonderful wife has been taking care of me... my Dad is in town visiting.. and my son,” McCaa wrote. “Sadly, haven’t had much chance spend time with them.”

McCaa told local-media blogger Ed Bark for a Dec. 30 post on Bark’s Uncle Barky’s Bytes site that he had had a pair of back teeth extracted a couple of weeks earlier and hoped to have them replaced with implants.

Get ready to cringe.

“But last week, while eating a piece of french bread with the teeth on the opposite side of my mouth, I heard something that sounded similar to the cracking of ice underfoot in the winter,” McCaa told Bark via email. “I immediately experienced some of the worst pain I have ever had.”

McCaa told Bark on Dec. 30, a Wednesday, that he expected to be home for at least a week. (You can read more here.).

UPDATE: In response to a DFW.com email, McCaa, who has a doctor’s appointment scheduled Tuesday, says he hopes to be back at work ASAP but that depends on what the doctor says.

“Already tired of soft foods,” he wrote, “but that may be what’s on the plate for a while. Itching to return to work.” McCaa also says that the teeth he had extracted “didn’t come out without a fight.”

McCaa talked about his love of drumming in DFW.com’s 2011 “The secret lives of anchors” feature.

He might still be having trouble talking, but McCaa has continued to be active on Facebook and Twitter.

This story was originally published January 4, 2016 at 5:30 PM.