I hope you manage to recover your work, it sucks to have to re-do everything from scratch, and it's hard to be as motivated as the first time.
No experience with this particular issue, but I would never trust such a complicated job to Word. I would produce the graphics in a real graphics/graphing package and import the image in Word. If Word screws up, I can just re-import the image. I only trust Word with simple stuff like letters. I may grudgingly accept using Word for a report if mandated by somebody like my boss, but I would make sure I could rebuild the document from text and external graphics within a reasonable time span.