Notes disappeared from Mac, but maybe not phone... yet. (Help, before I lose everything...)

So my Mac hasn't been synching with the changes I make on my phone. After months of this, I finally sit down to figure it out, and follow some "brilliant" suggestion to uncheck the Notes synch box and check it it again (in the Mac iCloud system preferences).

Well, as you can guess, as soon as I unchecked it, all my Mac Notes instantly disappeared. I'm too scared to check it again or do anything else, because for the moment, I'm still seeing 123 notes on my iPhone Notes though I'm not opening that folder either, I'm not touching anything!

[EDIT: Oh, forgot to mention Mac Notes closed unexpectedly, almost like it didn't know how to handle me unchecking the box... and I don't even want to try opening Notes (on Mac) again just incase it wants to try to synch its blank self onto my iPhone... even though the box is still unchecked. Can I just say here this synching business is really precarious to file safety? I've been nervous about it for years...]

That's a lot of years of Notes, many personal, irreplaceable notes and memories jotted down, but also many useful things I really want to keep for reference as well. (Took a lot of notes while learning about camera gear and filmmaking techniques.)

So does anyone know what I need to do, I can't try things out, I need to know what exactly is going on, and how to save my Notes, if possible at this point. Anyway, thanks for any effort put toward this, I'll probably be doing some reading, and maybe get on the phone with Apple... so annoying. (I mean, if you tap delete there's usually a warning, but if you uncheck a box there's not??)

Running High Sierra 10.13.6 (iMac 2017) and IOS 13.7 (Original iPhone SE)

Not sure what pics will be helpful, but here's a few...