Why may a mongoose document not get saved?

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model

Node.js

I've been using this middleware for sometime, then suddenly it stops working.

var body = req.body;

new ordersModel (body).save(function(err, newOrder, rowCount) {
	if (err) throw err;
	console.log(rowCount) // logs 1

	updateEstimatedTime(newOrder); /* this function runs but inside
   it, trying to find this same document returns null,
   meaning it was never saved */
});

What I have tried:

If I try something like

var pleaseWork = new ordersModel (body);
console.log(pleaseWork) // dumps a loaded mongoose object
pleaseWork.save(function(err, newOrder, rowCount) {

So why doesn't it get persisted? I also tried reloading the server several times with this at the top just in case

ordersModel.find({}, 'customer', function (err, docs) {
	if (err) throw err;
	console.log(docs)
})

But it just returns the documents that existed before this fault began. I've triple checked the model name, it's the same all over the script. What could the code be lacking?
I have seen some examples also that suggested something in the region of

var pleaseWork = new ordersModel ();
pleaseWork.foo = body.foo;
pleaseWork.bar = body.bar;
pleaseWork.john = body.john;

console.log(pleaseWork) // dumps a loaded mongoose object
pleaseWork.save(function(err, newOrder, rowCount) {

Now, this is not feasible for me; the ordersModel table has more than 10 columns-- dropping the body object in the model's constructor is sane enough and worked the last time the program was run.