Connection to Database Exception

Hi,

I have looked through the mailing list archives and several of the  
sites like WODev but could not find an easy answer to this question:

Is there any way to catch the exception that is thrown when the  
connection to the database is lost? I would like to catch this and  
try to reestablish the connection manually instead of giving an error  
page to my users.

Any pointers would be gladly accepted.