The hard disk of my late 2009 MacBook Pro appears to have become corrupted. I am traveling and do not have my install CD (and won't for several weeks, nor will I be anywhere near an Apple store).

The hard disk is not the original, which failed in June 2011. It's some Hitachi replacement installed by IT.

History: I was typing an email this afternoon, my computer suddenly started making soft clicking sounds and then froze. I was not moving around. I rebooted, which took a while. I heard more clicking sounds and the computer froze at least once again. It's now kind of working, with mdworker sucking up one CPU. There are no awkward hard drive sounds when I run Chrome or play music. However, when I launched Stickies, I found no trace of my saved Stickies. I ran a live disk verification from within Disk Utility, and it reported

Problem: As reported, I don't have access to an installation disc and am nowhere near an area where I can get one for at least two weeks. I have the option of asking someone to go to some trouble and expense to get one for me, but I'm not sure it's worth it:

1. I've read that I can use fsck from single-user mode to repair the disk. Should I just try this? Is it risky?
2. I'm concerned that the clicky sound portends imminent (mechanical) hard drive failure, so it's not worth doing a silly repair.

This hard disk is backed up, but I definitely won't be able to access the backup while traveling. I'd like to maximize the probability that I can keep using my computer (and all its current files) while traveling.

Update

I bit the bullet and ran fsck -fy from single-user mode. It only needed one pass (modification) to reach the "okay" stage. However, rebooting took nearly 5 min and involved several rounds of scratchy sounds and a few bad clicks. I'm now back to kind of using my computer (the same files are missing as before). When I ran live disk verification from Disk Utility this time, however, it reported that the volume appears to be OK.

Am I right to infer from the scratchy sounds, however, that my hard drive is still rapidly on its way out? Is there anything else I can do to increase its functionality over the next few weeks?