[Coda]

I would say that Calculus BC is almost certainly a good idea. Virtually EVERY degree program has a year of math as a general-education requirement, and any science degree is going to require more.

Calculus is actually not all that bad. Trigonometry is, in my opinion, harder, and most high school programs have you take trig before you take calculus. Calculus is basically just algebra but more so. I've seen you manipulate expressions without a problem; calculus just introduces a couple new manipulations: the derivative and the antiderivative. You'll get a long way with identities like "the derivative of x² is 2x".

One thing I'll point out is that you have me as a tutor. ;)

If your school offers Physics C, then you might end up taking them at the same time, but that shouldn't be a problem -- the calculus class should keep well ahead of the physics class in terms of what skills you need; I didn't use anything fancier than a double integral in all of the college physics courses I took. (It WOULD have gotten crazy if I had gone on into something like fluid dynamics.)