How to recover from "Timout closed before call" error

[prot0man]

I have a BlockingConnection thread that I run for processing RMQ events. After leaving this running for a while, eventually I end up getting the exception "Timeout closed before call" when I attempt to do:
channel.connection.process_data_events(time_limit=1).

I've recently added some code that if we do catch that exception, attempts to create a new channel and process events with that new channel--raising a system error if we fail on that attempt. Is this a hacky work around, or is there a more serious underlying issue I need to address?