I do have two general questions about shock absorbers and headgasket
1- How is it possible that you have a bad headgasket without overheating your car ?
2- Your rear struts develop a leak and they say rear shock absorbers need to be replaced but normally you can test your struts . Lean downward and see if your car bounces a few times or not . If it bounces like a ball time for new shocks but how how on earth you still need to replace your shocks even if they don't bounce at all lol
Your handling is good and level riding system work as supposed to be and you still need shocks ?
Thanks

 

If a strut or a shock is leaking, then yes it needs to be replaced. It is only a matter of time before it stops holding up. A head gasket can blow all sorts of ways, check for yellow foam under your oil cap, and do a "block test" to check for gasses in your coolant.

 

This is an example of a head gasket blowing on a 7.2 litre Chrysler engine.
In this case the engine sounded bad, was down on power but it never over heated and there was no coolant mix with oil. The cylinders were simply "swapping spit".
The engine was stripped due to another problem- metal fragments in the oil system and low oil pressure and THIS was also found!
[The Metal fragments DID NOT result in a spun bearing or scored journals- most amazingly (although I was sure not to drive it when I saw something was up). I feel sure that if this had happened to a modern aluminium pent roof VCT quad cam 32 valve engine , the engine would be junk in short order!]

 

Thank you for your valuable posts , much appreciated . I honestly prefer iron cast over aluminium , you can't easily beat those engines