iControl REST Python Requests module

While iControl REST is great and pretty robust given how much we use it.  But I come to the forum today to see if anyone has any experience with the Python requests module and the underlying urllib3 module.  When I do have problems with iControl its often with things like the following:

Here I've increased the timeout to 5.0 seconds but still get read timeouts.
HTTPSConnectionPool(host='redacted', port=443): Read timed out. (read timeout=5.0)

I also often see this message and, no I don't have a proxy in front of the F5.  However, I know the the F5 proxies the REST call

(Caused by ProxyError('Cannot connect to proxy.', OSError('Tunnel connection failed: 503 Service Unavailable',

Thanks!