Countif to include any number or specific text in merged cells

Okay, this is my first post ever. I can usually find a solution for what I'm trying to do, but this one is pretty unusual.
First, I want to count the number of cells in a range that contain either a number, OR specific text (PD). To complicate it, the cells in a range aren't contiguous. To complicate it further, the sheet contains merged cells. So even though this is a very simple spreadsheet, I'm having trouble making it do one simple calculation.

Here's a snipLedgerSnip.JPG

I know, I know - there are a million ways to make this more efficient, and it's usually a bad idea to merge cells. But I'm trying to drag my low-tech employees past the 20th century use of paper ledger pages for class enrollment. This is something that visually replicates what they're used to. It has some unprotected cells, and a little conditional formatting, but no real calculation, and we can all edit and view on our shared drive. So I'm not really up for changing the format (this year).

This sheet does exactly what I want, but it'd be really handy if it would count specific cells that contain a number (indicating a payment), or "PD." In H7 is where I'd like the total. It would total these occurrences in (upper-left of merged cell) in H9, H12, H15, H18, etc. Then, at a glance, anyone could see how many paid students are in a given class that month.

Anyone know any good ways of doing this?

Yes, I'm afraid I agree with him too. I never use merged cells in "functional" spreadsheets. But this one was more about record keeping than calculations, and the totaling was actually an afterthought. I've found a workaround, albeit a tedious one. In case anyone else is interested, in columns to the right, I used two columns for each month-the first one uses a countif to see if H9 is >0. The next one uses an if function to see if H9 says "PD" and if so, it =1, and I total each column. Then I return that tally to H7. Seems to work perfectly so far. I just hope it doesn't get buggy and quit finding the data in the upper left cell of merged cells down the road.

But I'm always willing to learn, and there's bound to be a shorter/better way - I'm just a self taught guy that tries to research & solve one of my problems at a time. You may have a much better solution for me. About done working for today, but I'll delete some tabs, and other stuff, and upload a stripped down version tomorrow.

Thanks to both of you.