Yeah, it's loads of fun. Working on this problem for 6 straight hours and such...
That's actually one of my other thoughts!
I don't have the root password, and I think maybe Apache uses root access to get mysql.pm. I'll try that.
If that doesn't work, I'll make another script that does "use lib path/to/mysql.pm" to include a locally installed copy of the mysql module, then require the script I want to run. Maybe that will work.