Lost images, need help recovering

I plug in the external hard drive, access the Lightroom catalog file folder thing, drag it over into my hard drive, at this point I didn’t see any download status bar or anything and so I dragged the catalog folder on my computer into the trash, when I did this the folder in my hard drive also disappeared, so I went in the trash folder and recovered it, I then tried to access the folder which took me to the Lightroom app and showed that I had zero pictures in my Lightroom catalog, I shut down the computer and close it, and then I find like 4,000 photos in Lightroom(some of mine and some of my brother's) and about 2,500 in my folder of images in Lightroom. I then took my computer today to the IT department and they said there’s little they could do but they referred me to some adobe specialists through email. Then those people emailed me later today and asked if the .lrat file or something along those lines was in my Lightroom folder that was located in my user files or something. It was not. That’s all that has happened