Wendy:
Have you considered a hard drive data recovery program? When ours went down it was because my lovely DH decided to divide the hard drive and create different partitions or something. My computer tech support DH accidentally formatted over the pics...they were unrecoverable.... and he is lucky to still be breathing, and still be married...LOL. I know what you mean about bawling for days. I was very distraught over it too. There are many programs on the market that can sometimes go in and recover info...do a google...some of them advertise that you don't have to pay for the process/program until after you see a list of the things they can recover. I have my fingers crossed for you.
Great news to hear that things are progressing on Michael's surgery! Looking forward to hearing all great news that will bring!
~Elisa