Remember my scary 'check-out' experience? I had never heard of these (well, I'd heard of the words, being a medical librarian, but didn't know what they meant), but it sounds very much like what I experienced. When I was a kid I had staring episodes my mom described as petit mal seizures; several of the children in my family apparently had them, but we grew out of them. There have been a few brief 'blackouts' before, just not so long. Unlike absence seizures, complex partial ones can last longer and sometimes have 'automatisms' like nodding or grunting assent included. Well, actually, longer absence seizures can, too, apparently, it's just not common. They show up differently on EEGs and come from different parts of the brain, though. I'm wondering if part of my attention/dissociative symptoms could be explained by this. I just don't know if it's possible...I've had two sleep studies, after all, and I think they do EEGs for those, yet no one mentioned any indication of seizure.
There are some (oh, alright, You Know Who You Are) who would just chock this up to my being obsessed with my health, or trying to add one more illness I've heard about (the joke has always been that if another person contracted leprosy, so would I; I'm not so much a hypochondriac, since most things I've ever thought I had, I did, but I do have psychosomatic issues and just well, obsession about various things wrong with my body). This time I'm (hopefully) not going to obsess on the idea, but I am going to talk to my psychiatrist next week and it would be an opportunity to mention what happened and if there could be a physical basis for this particular bit of weirdness.
eMedicine - Complex Partial Seizures : Article by Anthony M Murro, MD
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