The clipboard is just temporary, usually, unless you're doing something wacky I don't know about. I usually only see the "recover document" thing if I crash Word. You can try crashing Word to see if it gets it back, but probably not. (Why didn't you save it as a file?)

Another thing you can try that used to work but I don't know if it does anymore, is if you go to the Start menu on the computer, click Search, then look for all the files created within the last day, and see if MS Word autosaved it.