Can absence seizures be only 1 - 2 seconds long?

Hi ive had the same thing happen it scared the shit outta me. I wld normally feel tired afterwards however n have to pull over n sleep for 15 minutes, especially since i had a baby in the car. I was given a sleep deprivation EEG wich showed epileptic spikes. Tho ATM I haven't got a Formal diagnoses

Hi Rdh101790, I've been told that my very brief absences during weight lifting excercises are probably caused by brief syncope (a brief fainting spell). The "absences" were frequent enough during heavy excercise so as to stop heavy free-weight & "non-transmissioned/clutched machine" weight lifting (dropped weights hit hard, and wild cables go flying). I have an infant cardiac medical history that matches LQTS(-2), and which can also cause, or be often co-morbid to, epilepsy. My epilepsy generally consists of seizures from temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), with secondarily generalized tonic-clonic (TCs) becoming more intense/frequent the last couple decades (the TCs seizures have presently been minimized with Keppra). I often wonder if my such brief absences aren't epileptic also, as syncope typically takes at least 7 seconds for "full brief loss of consciousness", but syncoptal amnesia is then blamed for the sensation of the syncopal pre-ictal & ictal event being self-perceived as much less than a second long in total. My TLE complex partial seizures are often are longer than a minute, and I can easily detect any minute, or longer, TLE related loss of full awareness by reading minutes into an audio recorder synced with a GPS unit while being active, or just walking. I've thought about a continuos video camera to try to catch anything shorter than a minute in duration, but the price of such a camera is an obstacle (then, many people already confront me over my GPS and my reading the time aloud at more than a whisper in public). In extreme longer & drastic instances over minutes, in infancy, I turned "blue" before any resultant "epileptic" seizures, while now, in later adulthood, I turn "blue" from any cyanosis during, or toward the end of, intense epileptic seizures. But, in many very short in mild instances, with few signs and symptoms, determining the differences tends toward being guesswork without active close monitoring Differentials between LQTS & epilepsy seems to be more confounding than just with the "as" of "Detailed history taking is essential to establish a diagnosis inpatients with transient loss of consciousness (TLOC); in particular to distinguish syncope from epilepsy (Hoefnagels et al., 1991;Sheldon et al., 2002; Thijs et al., 2008b)." From "Symptoms and signs of syncope: a review of the link between physiology and clinical clues", by Wieling, et al. (Brain 2009: 132; 2630–2642) http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/132/10/2630.full.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19928543 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20533164 Tadzio