So me sending from my Electrum wallet means I've lost my coins? 
Wait what? Isn't Electrum a wallet where you have access to your private keys? Why can't you use Electrum?
That's what I thought too. You can import your Keys from the server with Electrum but then that defeats the Seed recovery thing that appeals to most people.
I think you're misunderstanding how Electrum works.
The seed is generated on your PC and is deterministic, so that seed is used by the Electrum client locally to generate your private/public keys.
The server part is only for the blockchain, no keys go to or from the server. I believe if you look in the source of Electrum and replicated the deterministic algorithm you can replicate your wallet in any program if you have the correct seed. This is an entirely offline operation. Electrum is not a web wallet at all.
You have the private key of a public address in your Electrum wallet, and thus should be able to use it for the purposes being discussed here.