We lost our sales order status field. We need a workaround

We had to turn off the standard NetSuite approval process on sales orders because it would NOT commit inventory on unapproved orders.. (*by design, and with no options to change that behavior).

So, now we have a new problem.  We use a custom "approval status" field with options like "approved", "pending approval", "canceled".

We no longer have access to the standard Netsuite STATUS field on our sales orders. This one --> {status}

How can we sync our custom "approval status" field with NetSuite's standard {status} field when an order needs to be canceled?  I want to be able to set our custom field to "canceled" and have NS change {status} to also = "canceled".  I tried with mass updates, but {status} isn't available in mass updates.  Or, at least some way to even manually access {status} would be nice.  I can still display {status} in saved searches of sales orders and it has statuses like "billed".. so I know it is active and in use.. I just have to way to access