I have been reviewing and editing a big (56-page) Word document over the past few days. Change tracking has been on, and I have made quite a number of tracked changes and inserted quite a few comments. I hit Save (Cmd-S) frequently, including at the end of each editing session. I keep the document (and Word) open all the time. Sometimes I have been working on other Word docs with the big document in the background.

I hadn't worked on the big document for 2 days. I just brought it back to the front a few minutes ago to start editing and commenting again, and all of my tracked changes and comments have disappeared - completely gone.

I used Time Machine to check a few past versions of the document, and all my changes were gone in those as well.

Here's something that might be relevant: Word has been crashing a LOT in the past few days. I will double-click on a document in Finder to open it; it will open for a split second, then Word will crash. That happened yesterday. Word sent a report about the crash then restarted and reopened all docs. That could be when all my changes were lost - but I had Saved the document - I'm 100% sure of that.

HELP!!! I'm afraid all my edits are gone for good - unless one of you has a magic suggestion.
Can you anybody recommend a way to recover all my edits?

Do you have any idea why this happened, and how I might be able to prevent it from happening again?

Version: Word for Mac 2011 14.7.6

Note: I have a deadline to complete my review of this document and I lost three days of work. I'm desperate to get an answer. I submitted this question to more than one forum.
Thanks
Clint