Good Morning @dvintage
Just sharing with you my experience which might be helpful. When I was a teenager and started to have my focal seizures (auras and complex partial seizures), they lasted very few seconds. I was just absent for very few seconds and do not remember my mother saying I had body movements during my seizures. But I can clearly remember the different taste in my mouth and the smell in my nose I had at the beginning of the seizure as well as the deja vu sensation. I did not experience any symptoms after the seizure. I retook my activities as if nothing had happened, not feeling tired and confused. But this has changed later. Today, after my seizures, I get confused and can not speak after them (sometimes for 1 hour). Perhaps for this reason, my epilepsy has not been diagnosed at that time.
When those episodes started, my mother took me back to the neurologist who took care of me after I had an accident when I was 5 years old and stayed in a coma for 1 week. I repeated the exams and nothing was diagnosed. The neurologist said to my mother this was my nature. As the episodes continued and my parents were not satisfied with the answer of my neurologist here in São Paulo city (Brazil), they asked a family member living in Washington DC to take me to an appointment at the Children's Hospital there during some holidays I spent in Washington when I was 14 years old (1984). Nothing was diagnosed and I continued with my life.
Today after my diagnosis, I know that my epilepsy was caused by this event when I was 5 years old, manifesting itself in a very subtle way when I became a teenager and evolving throughout the years.
Based on my experience, if I were in your place, I would take your child to an epileptologist, a neurologist with much more experience in epilepsy compared to a neurologist. As @jakedduck1 mentioned, taking your child for an EMU stay to rule out the possibility of epilepsy is advisable.
Knowing about the different types of epilepsy syndrome and seizures might also be helpful. The Epilepsy Foundation has great material on that and has helped me a lot in understanding my epilepsy. Here is a link with the types of seizures that gave a very good understanding of what happened to me:
https://www.epilepsy.com/what-is-epilepsy/seizure-types
All the best to you and your son!
Chris (@santosha)