I don't make a habit of this, but sometimes, in an effort to work around a circular import, I'll import a function from inside another function or method like this:

class MyClass:
    def my_method(self):
        from somewhere import the_thing
        x = the_thing()
        return x + 4

This works just fine, but I can't figure out how to test it. My usual fails with complaints that module "xyz" has no attribute "the_thing":

from unittest import TestCase
from unittest.mock import patch


class MyTestCase(TestCase):
    @patch("path.to.my.module.the_thing")
    def test_stuff(self):
        ...

Is there a way to mock functions imported at runtime? Is there a Better Way to do this?