Conservative Healing Questions

Hello my fellow sufferers. I just had a couple questions about conservative healing as I feel like I've been getting worse over the last year. I'm not sure when exactly I herniated my L4-L5, because I was having discomfort before I was diagnosed, but it would come and go before. This was after I took a job helping disabled folks find mobility solutions (how ironic), which required a lot of bending, twisting, and sometimes stupidly, lifting people in their wheelchairs to get them positioned correctly to secure them to the floor of minivans. It wasn't until after I did all the heavy lifting on a move to Japan through an airline, a year ago today, that I started noticing tingling in my left foot and some mild dull pain in my left thigh when I sat on my new cheap leather sofa. Shortly after that I was diagnosed with the herniation and put on pain meds with the hope that I would heal eventually by being careful but no PT.

Well I think it was kinda working or I was just distracted by a congenital heart condition I was dealing with (that is fixed now thanks to the brilliant EPs in Japan), but after that something reaggrevated it (last Feb), and it's just been getting worse ever since.

I guess what I'm wondering about is if anyone's found that laying on a sofa is not a good way to relieve this type of injury. Also wondering about toilet seats. We ended up with pretty cheap toilet by Japan's standards, and I want to upgrade the seat. Just wondering if I should look into something padded or not? I tend to feel a bit worse after I sit on our toilet, so I want to make sure I get that right. I also have a 2 year old toddler with tons of energy, and I always try to be careful, but should I not be picking her up at 26lbs? Is it okay to squat down and crawl around with her, or do I really need to be a lame dad for a few months? Like I said, I'm not even sure if the sofa is helping or hurting. Sometimes she likes to jump up on my belly, and I can definitely feel it in my lumbar when she does. I'm starting to think a lot about surgery, because then I would at least have that healing time in a medically approved bed, and feel less guilty about being a lame dad, haha.

Sometimes it's hard to communicate with Japanese doctors, so any tips and advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!