NOTES DISAPPEARED ON 4S PLEASE HELP! I've seen other threads and NOTHING WORKS

I have an iPhone 4S, and today I woke up and went to add something to one of my notes, which were working fine yesterday, and they are all gone. I am almost in tears right now as I have a terrible memory, and I have very important notes on my phone. This has NEVER happened before.

Something odd I noticed recently is that my phone has been creating doubles of many of my notes. Thinking it was just a bug I deleted these doubles.

I have just read through other threads, and I have tried the apparent "fix", which is to turn notes off on email, but nothing has changed, and after looking at the notes folder in my email, it is showing me ONLY 3 NOTES.

I have a gmail account, and I believe I'm on iOS7 (the previous update changed the phone design completely). There has been a pending update for ages that I haven't had room on my phone to install.

When I turned notes off on my email, it said it would delete all gmail notes from my phone.

This is all the information I can think of right now, please someone help, I NEED these notes back, it is very important.