SSH timeout causes screen hang

As a dialup user, this issue has been bothering me for a while. 

step 1) Have happy little screen session started with "ssh user@host
screen -xURR"
step 2) Ssh timeout/dialup connection fails.

step 3) After a short time, irssi (or whatever you were looking at)
stops updating but still accepts input.
step 3) Connect back in the same way as before

step 4) Eventually, irssi hangs and you time out from all your
channels, which is, some might say, not the intended function.

To remedy this, I kill -9 all but the most recent instance of ssh and
everything unclogs

$user=`whoami`
a=`pgrep -u $user sshd|wc -l`
let a=a-1
pgrep -u $user sshd|head -n $a|xargs --no-run-if-empty kill -9


-- 
Patrick