Recovering a file that WAS saved...

I know this sounds strange, but yesterday I spent nearly 4 hours on a document and I naturally save every 20-30 seconds or so. I'm POSITIVE that within this time frame I saved my work, however when I came back to it it was not there. Here's a chronology of events that happened:
1) received file from superior via hotmail, opened the file, saved it and started work on it
2) consistently saved the file throughout the work day
3) closed my computer without closing anything (perhaps then causing a force shut down). I did not properly 'shut down' my computer so perhaps is this where the problem initiated?

I tried to find it in Search and only the original file from my superior comes up, no changes made to it. I looked in the Excel - Recover files? folder and it was empty.

somebody PLEASE help...

This happened to me. But I always saved my files as different name e.g file1.1, 1.2 and so on. If your using a laptop which I'm guessing sometimes I lose word documents because I put it on standby. You could try
Start Bar < Recent Items < Then it could be there. If not you could try to start over, I know its annoying but that's all I know.