http://kb.mozillazine.org/Recovering_a_profile_that_suddenly_disappeared

What do you think we are, computer experts....??? Thunderbird needs to have a better way to help rather than computer gibberish that most users of email dont understanding

Well, obviously, it isn't designed to deliberately trash the users's profile, so something has gone wrong and it has done something that shouldn't have happened. Part of your profile is damaged and needs to be repaired.

I can't fix your profile for you. I have shown you the instructions that I would have followed if this happened to me. If you can't follow these yourself then you really need to find someone who you can trust to follow and carry out the advised repair.

A snarky and unhelpful answer would be "restore from your most recent backup". But I recognise that most users won't have a backup and won't be comfortable working with files and folders. The best I can offer is the already provided advice on what needs to be done.

Add an aside, I once lost my profile in the same way as has happened to you. I realised, when repairing, that I had several cryptically named profiles and only the date/time stamp told me which one I'd been using. I decided then to remove all the old profiles and rename the working profile to a name that meant something to me. I have done this same thing to all my Thunderbird and Firefox profiles and have not lost a single one since doing that. I would urge you to do the same if you proceed to attempt a repair for yourself.

I just found a 2016 backup of my email account and restored it to that date based on your suggestions. I am glad I did it the next day when I was more alert. Zenos, I am thankful for your help and will do a better job of backing up in the future. Watzka