Stripping Text From AlphaNumeric Strings

I'm working on an attendance spreadsheet that shows the employee's absence using the format "X####", where X can be one of the following three values: S(for sick time), P(for personal time), and V(for vacation); "####" is the number of hours absent (can be from 0.25 to 8.0,measured in 15-minute increments, # can be either a digit from 0 to 9 or a decimal point, and there can be from 1 to 4 characters, but must be >0(I'm not worried about data validation yet).Examples are P8.0, V.5 (V0.5), S2.75,etc.

The spreadsheet is laid out such that each row represents an employee, and each column is a workday. After the employee's information are three columns labeled P,V, S. I'm trying to generate a formula that when applied to an employee's row, will display a running total of the absent hours based upon personal, vacation, or sick time taken. We'll call the range "CAL"(Short for calender)

To strip out the numeric characters on the right, I use the formula RIGHT(CAL, (LEN(CAL)-1)). To Determine which column the data should be summed in, I use the formula LEFT(CAL,1). Blank Cells are permitted, in fact most of the row will be blank. Now that I've figured out how to strip out the alpha from the numeric, how can I get the totals? I apologize for writing "War and Peace," but I wanted to be as concise as possible-