Message Publishing Timeout

[FunnyFossils]

For the MQTTClient library running in async mode I noticed some logic I have to handle a client disconnecting can become hung up in an infinite loop.
After investigation I found that if MQTTClient_publish5 is invoked during or after connection to the broker has been lost then it will cause an infinite loop in the logic where it checks if the outbound message count is less than or equal to inflight message count (for my case the max inflight is 1)

while (m->c->outboundMsgs->count >= m->c->maxInflightMessages ||
         Socket_noPendingWrites(m->c->net.socket) == 0) 

I saw other Paho Implementations include something that specifies the maximum amount of time to wait for publishing a message. Unless I am misunderstanding I don't see an equivalent mechanism in this library, and so I was wondering what can I do to escape from this infinite loop scenario.