European honeymoons are the stuff dreams are made of, but for British blogger Peony Lim it soon turned into a nightmare.

The fashion blogger ended a notable absence from her Instagram account – which has almost 90,000 followers – by surprising her fans with an update on the events of the past two weeks.

“I’m sorry I have been absent online recently. As you might have guessed from this photo a lot has happened. Meet my husband Matthew,” she wrote next to an image of her and her husband on their wedding day.

A post shared by Peony Lim (@peonylim) on Jul 9, 2017 at 1:09pm PDT

“I didn’t plan on introducing him like this, but things don’t always work out how they’re planned.”

Lim told her fans that she would fill them in on the details of her wedding another day, but wanted to share the “frightening” events of her honeymoon to let others who may be “struggling” know they are not alone.

She said their honeymoon to the Italian Lakes was, in the beginning, idyllic as the couple toured on speedboats and luxury cars.

“Everything was perfect. We couldn’t have been happier or more excited,” she wrote.

“Each hotel and lake was stunning. We spent our time exploring villages looking for local fare with our little convertible Abarth and speedboats.”

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What Lim soon learned, however, was that battling with a foreign language can be fun when things are going well, but disastrous when things are going wrong.

“But on our penultimate night things began to unravel; it became obvious he was going to have to have emergency appendix surgery far from home and since then we have been battling through ambulances and hospitals who have very little English and our even poorer Italian,” she wrote.

“We are finally home and Matthew is making a good recovery. We are so grateful to all the kind staff at Ospedale Castelli Pronto Soccorso that cheerfully helped us patiently with the aid of Google translate!”

While Lim’s honeymoon didn’t end the way she hoped – they were forced to abandon the second part of their trip planned for Seychelles – she said it also taught her a lot about her new marriage.

Always @oscardelarenta

A post shared by Peony Lim (@peonylim) on Jan 4, 2017 at 2:44am PST

“It’s been a frightening struggle that neither of us could have foreseen but the experience has shown us how much we love each other, how strong we can be for each other and how much we meant the vows we made so recently to each other.”

Confessing that it was normally “not my thing” to share details of her private life, she thought it was important to show her followers “that nothing runs smoothly for anyone all the time”.

“If you’re struggling with something you’re not alone. We are with you.”