Got two bulging discs 5 years ago (L4/L5). Have impingement on my femoral and syatic nerves.
I ride a desk for work and do hobby farming to stay active outside of work, and work part time as a first responder (EMS)
I have a cane for bad days, and meloxicam for really bad days/weeks.
Doing CPR sucks, running sucks, basically most excersises suck. I can't pick up my kids as much as I'd like, and I am having a hard time convincing my wife to let me try bull riding... doing to much gives me nerve shocks down both legs from by butt down to my heels.
But, I push through and try to stay active.
I've done physical therapy twice, both times made it worse. Tried a chiropractor, each visit would give me about 45-60 minutes of relief after the procedure.
Long car rides are about the worst. I'll be bent over almost double getting out. During isn't bad, it's the straitening out afterwards.
I function best at 750mg-1g of caffeine... actually lowers my reading heart rate.
Former FF, and current EMT here.
Just to add a few things, Fire Departments are also increasingly running paramedics or EMTs to be able to do more care before the ambulance shows up. It's not uncommon for the FD to beat my ambulance to a scene.
They are also great lifters and pusher pushers. One of my favorite lines is "lift with your firefighters, not your back." I can't tell you how many times their muscle has been helpful on a scene. But, they still have to respond to fires, and their understaffed, so they cant bring their SUV to my medical.
And as for pushers. Running a code, my medic will be pushing drugs, I'll be breathing for the patient, I'll have a fire fighter pushing on the patients chest, and another ff driving the rig. Three people is super obnoxious in the back of a vanbulance... it still gets tight in the back of my box that is on an f450 chasis, but way better than it could be.
I also use neo launcher
It's about $80/month each for me. I'll usually keep two deactivated while they are parked in the barn. I'll have two active, and the other two are either waiting for me to repair them, or waiting till the other two break down. Sucked that one time I had three down at the same time...
I've had good luck using permethrin as a bug repellant instead of a clothing treatment.
They're (PIA) also owned by an ad company...
I used a sapphire. I'm a ceramic engineer, and sapphire is just alumina, so I think it's cool, and you can get basically any color you want.
I've done this upgrade already. Partially because one of my computers that shipped with windows 11 was unuseable because of how slow it was...
It's getting harder and harder to make things smaller, but they are making things thinner now, which means they can layer them, thus increasing density.
Just to clear the air, the objection tends to be on the grounds that certain medicines/vaccines are tested on stem cells harvested from an aborted baby. While there are other objections, this is the most common one I have run into.
If these individuals are consistent in their objections (avoid tylonel, Advil, and any other meds tested in these stem cells) Then I believe we should respect their religious convictions. But, consistentcy is key here, you can't pick and choose.
We either believe that people have the right to have different beliefs than others, or we don't. We also can't be inconsistent with that ideology. But we can absolutely challenge them when being inconsistent, i.e., if one religious symbol is allowed, any competing ones that someone desires to place must also be allowed.
I have updated my comment to direct to a comment from @weststadtgesicht that is more accurate.
Lee Strobel (former athirst, investigative journalist) wrote a book titled The Case For Christ.
His goal was to write the difinive work on proving that Jesus wasn't who the Christians claim him to be. It backfired on him and he became a Christian.
(See below comment from @weststadtgesicht with a more accurate quote.)
If you're wanting to read more on this topic, definitely read both sides and determine which has the stronger case. But the Strobel book seems to be well researched and well written, at least to me.
I don't struggle a lot with it. Occasionally I'll have an issues, but it's not bad at all. Sometimes I have to switch severs, but I'll usually find a working one in 1-2 tries.
The only outright block I run into is sometimes .gov sites won't let me in unless I'm set to a us server.
I've been using Proton for 4ish years now and like it. Email, VPN, drive, and calendar. I use something else instead of proton pass, but just for diversity.
I've been very happy with the whole Proton suite for almost 4 years now (though, I've never used the free plan)
Depends on the server. I rarely am over there, but sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't
PIA was bought out and is currently owned by an ad company.