ADO recordset is closed when being returned from a function

At times I need to check if a record has been inserted into an SQL database. Sometimes I need to wait for the record to be inserted into the database (we sync certain records between two databases, it syncs every 5 minutes). To do that I wrote the following function:

def wait_record_in_db(conn_str, query_str, timeout=300):
  conn = open_db_conn(conn_str) #This function is definitely working.
  results = conn.execute_(query_str)
  while results.EOF and timeout > 0:
    Delay(20000)
    results = conn.execute_(query_str)
    timeout -= 20

  return results

Basically it just checks if the query returns any records, and if not waits until it does or the time limit has been reached. This way I can check if the record is in the database every 20 seconds and then return the results, instead of just hard-coding a 5 minute wait.

The problem is that the recordset that this function returns is closed for some reason. When I try to check if the returned recordset has any records in it like this:

results = wait_record_in_db(conn_str, query_str)

if results.EOF:
  Log.Error('No record found')
else:
  Log.Checkpoint('Record found')

I get the following runtime error:

This is the first time I've tried returning a recordset from a function. I have no idea why it would be closing the recordset in that context. If I take the code out of the function and just run it all from my main function it works fine. But obviously I don't want to have to repeat this same code everywhere I need to use it, that's the whole point of having functions in the first place