Hyrax Heck
Wearing a Hyrax expander is not hell, but it is heck. The dumb thing gets in the way of the tongue helping suction saliva back to the throat to be swallowed, so I have to do a weird, sucky-cheeky swallow or I gargle and salivate while talking. The bar across the middle is lower than on an MSE, which impedes my tongue more, and more food gets stuck on it. You’d think that more space would make it easier to clean with my tongue, but so much food fits up there that I end up just mashing a min-bolus around without actually removing it. I had the Hyrax installed this afternoon and I already dislike it.
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More importantly, I wonder what effect using a tooth-borne appliance after a bone-borne appliance will be. I know that the Hyrax is used after SARPE, but in that operation there are cuts at the top of the maxilla and at the back of the maxilla at the pterygomaxillary buttress to lessen resistance there. My suture is wide open, but I still have an intact buttress. I have had mild gingival recession and bone loss on my molars from malocclusion and grinding, so I liked that MSE was boneborne. My orthodontist says I should be able to expand at the rate of a teen now that my suture is open, but my midface has already bent two MSE expanders.
Now for the covid rant. I half-jokingly (and therefore half-seriously) asked my ortho if we could contact Dr. Won Moon (inventor of the MSE) and see if we get one of the extra-strong expanders he is developing. I was assuming the answer would be that you can’t just randomly ask for an experimental device that is not yet on the market, I get it that it has to go through the proper trials and approval first. Instead my ortho said that right now it is hard in Canada to get orthodontic stuff because the border is closed, some office are worried about running low on stuff. So maybe if I was in the USA I could email Dr. Moon and try to get in his experiment. Oh well. The Mews are in England and the good MSE/DOME docs are in the USA. All we have in Canada is domestic peace, a functional political process, a head of state so non-controversial that almost everyone forgets she exists until her kids and grandkids do something dumb, and a strong welfare state that doesn’t overly impede private enterprise.
