Problem with swatches?

I started a discussion a few days ago because I did something to a pattern I created and was not sure what but now I think I have discovered what I did wrong. The other day I was creating a repeating pattern and it all got messed up and would not allow me to change colors or anything. This is the other discussion where I explain it more in depth How to fix this problem: I don't know what I did? but anyways essentially I think what I did was I had the whole individual parts of the pattern selected so I could drag it into the swatches panel and then I clicked on the new swatch so the original pattern that I created turned into a swatch or was overlayed with the swatch I just created and messed everything up. I then unknowingly saved the messed up version of the pattern and quit illustrator because it was acting up. I hope this makes sense but is there any way to return the pattern back to it's original version?