Brushes gone?

Please follow my story of woes as I desribe what I THINK happened to my brushes:

I'm logged into my account all the time.  I have a personal profile.  My general practice is to always merge preferences when updating apps.  Whatever that check box is, it's checked.  Never had an issue.

Then, I joined a shared group that uses Adobe apps for my work.  So I logged out of my personal profile, logged back in, now clicking to join the group I am not part of.  I then chose the company profile instead of my personal profile.

Everything was fine.  Then I updated Photoshop.  And I THINK, under this new company profile, I didn't pay attention to the "merge preferences?" check box.  By default, I believe Adobe does NOT merge preferences and so I blindly updated and missed this message.

So then I think Photoshop updated, it wiped my preferences.  Most importantly, my brushes.

I tried logging out and logging back in with my personal profile, but the damage was done.

Does this seem correct?  I'm making some assumptions, because I don't know why else my brushes would be gone.  I'm assuming I stupidly missed the checkbox when I updated Photoshop because I wasn't used to clicking "merge preferences" under the new profile.

And so, there's no good way to get them back now, right?

I'm on a Mac but I don't use time machine.  I have plenty of brushes downloaded and saved locally, but I gotta reorganize them all into my various different folders/collections now, and a few custom brushes I made are gone.

I'm screwed right?  Just give it to me straight...