Airport Problem

Okay, before I start telling you all about my problem, I know it has been discussed on many different forums before. I wanted to get specifics about my particular problem. So ...

I have a aluminum macbook running OS X 10.5.8. It is from around March 2009.

All of a sudden today my status bar at the top, showed my connection with having no bars inside of the triangle/diamond. I hovered my mouse over it and it displayed "No AirPort card installed". I went to System Pref>Networks and seen Airport but it was not connected or anything. I began researching all over the internet and seen a bunch of solutions to the problems(none of which worked for me) including resetting the pRAM etc. I ran disk utility permissions and everything seemed to be fine. Everything was updated, including the airport drivers. One of the solutions was to delete AirPort in the Network settings and re-add it. When i went to re-add it there wasn't AirPort as an option, only Ethernet, PPPoE, and Bluetooth. I began to panic even more because now there is no AirPort in my Network settings showing. I do not know how to get this back.

As you can see I am in such a dilemma and am wondering how do I solve these problems. My internet connection/airport settings were working fine since I used it last night. Not even 15 hours later it starts to give me problems. If anyone could help me that would be great. Thanks!