Controlling term explosion with Biopython

I've been unable to find documentation on how to control explosion of terms when conducting a Biopython search of Medline/PubMed.

For example, if I search for surgery, oral [MH] on PubMed, it finds 69,926 matching publications. (PubMed is said to automatically explode terms.)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=surgery%2C+oral+%5BMH%5D&sort=date&show_snippets=off

But the code below returns a count of only 8561 publications. Even more puzzling, the translation stack in the output appears to claim that the term was exploded.

import Bio.Entrez as Entrez
import pprint

search_handle = Entrez.esearch( 
                    db = "pubmed", 
                    term = "surgery, oral [MH]", 
                    rettype = 'uilist', 
                    retmax = 1,
                    )
search_results = Entrez.read(search_handle)
search_handle.close()
pprint.pprint( search_results.items() )

Here is the output:

[(u'Count', '8561'),
 (u'RetMax', '1'),
 (u'IdList', ['33499855']),
 (u'TranslationStack',
  [{u'Count': '8561', u'Field': 'MeSH Terms', u'Term': '"surgery, oral"[MeSH Terms]', u'Explode': 'Y'}, 'GROUP']),
 (u'TranslationSet',
  [{u'To': '"surgery, oral"[MeSH Terms]', u'From': 'surgery, oral[MH]'}]),
 (u'RetStart', '0'),
 (u'QueryTranslation', '"surgery, oral"[MeSH Terms]')]

How do I force Biopython to ask Medline to explode the term? This is Biopython 1.75. I am limited to Python 2.7.

Thank you.

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