Need to interrupt to check for mouse movement

[stringy]

I have a program that shows a 3d representation of a cell, depending on
some data that it receives from some C++. It runs with wx.timer(500),
and on wx.EVT_TIMER, it updates the the data, and receives it over the
socket.
In my program I also want to be able to rotate the 3d representation,
and can do so, and all the code works. However, I have a problem in
that while the program is updating itself (pretty much all the time
unless I tell it not to), it won't detect mouse motion, I'm guessing
because it doesn't have time to.

Is there any manual way to get a program to check for mouse movement,
that way I'd be able to check for mouse movement half way through my
updating the data over the socket, and then do the necessary rotations
before it finishes updating the data.