Turned on iCloud calendar app, hit merge and old calendar is gone

Actually, I did this on my wife’s iphone and she is not happy.

She wanted a shared calendar so I set up an icloud calendar on my phone. She could not see and I enabled iCloud calendars. It asked if I wanted to merge, so i said Yes. Now ALL of her entires are gone. It seems the old calendar is entirely gone.

She never used iCloud prior so definitely no backup option there. She has not done an iTunes synch in a very long while. There is no restore hope. We saw an option to go to Settings/Calendars/Synch all, but this had no effect.

Any other idea or solutions?!?