Messages disappear/ Can't send new

My imessages and sms messages disappear once I've seen them. All my messages are gone, I have 0 in conversation storage. I can swipe to the left and view the message. In that box, I can reply and it will work but once I've looked at the message it is gone. If I just click on the notification, the new text box opens for me to create a new text instead of showing me the contents of the text that just came in. The other problem is that the only way I can send a text is to reply to one when it comes in as I described above swiping left to view. I can address a text and type the message, but I'm unable to hit the send button. It just does nothing until I cancel the text. This started on saturday. To my knowledge there were no updates. I was running 11.x and had been for a few weeks. I upgraded yesterday to 11.3.1 hoping it would help, but nothing has changed.

I have tried:

powering off

resetting by hitting the home button and the top button on iphone 5s

resetting imessage by disabling and enabling

changing how long I keep text messages to forever

changing notification settings for messages different ways, not allowing notifications, on/off: locks screen, history, banners, temporary/persistent

using siri to read unread messages - interesting point here was that I had a couple messages come in I was expecting her to read, but she also read one from a number I had silenced so I was unaware of that one. I can tell siri to reply to one of the messages and tell her to send and she says she sent it, but I never hear it send and it never arrives for the recipient.

Any help is so appreciated!!