Former Cleveland News Anchor Fighting Cancer For a Second Time Finds Love With a Man Who Lost His Wife to the Disease

"I wish I had somebody special who, you know, was there for me and could run their fingers through my hair and have my hair come out in their fingers," she tells the station where she once worked.

However, she's changing her attitude now as she battles cancer for a second time, going through eight rounds of chemotherapy. She's met the man, Rob Winebrenner, she's been waiting for her "whole life," and she isn't letting him go.

Robin and Rob's Story

It's true what they say: you find love when you're least expecting it. And that's how Swoboda met Winebrenner at a pig roast over the summer.

"There's this handsome guy, and you know, I think he's flirting with me," she says.

"Would you like to go out sometime?" Swoboda recalls the man saying to her, to which she responded: "’I'm chubby, I have white hair, I'm in my 60s, I have cancer. Do you want to go out with me?" Winebrenner said, "yeah, I do." Cue the waterworks!

"The more I talked to her, the more I wanted to hear about her story and what she was going through," Winebrenner tells 3News about the day he met Swoboda. "I found (her story) interesting as much as I found her interesting."

Winebrenner himself is also no stranger to cancer; his wife died of cancer. Because he's been through this with a partner before, while on their third date, Winebrenner knew exactly how to navigate an extremely difficult and stressful situation. Swoboda was having a dangerous reaction after she underwent her first round of chemotherapy, and Winebrenner rushed her to the hospital, where she remained in the intensive care unit for three days.

"He has seen me at my worst," she tells 3News. "I mean, he took me to the ER, he knows my weight, he knows my sodium numbers, he's seen it all and he keeps coming back. It's just crazy!" But for Winebrenner it's anything but crazy.

"I'm very much in love with her," Winebrenner says. "I don't know (when) the first time I said 'I love you' was, but I think it was in the ICU."

"You can go through all of that and look at the positive side," Winebrenner adds. "I've never been around someone as happy as she is, and that makes me happy. There's not a day we don't wake up laughing. We go to bed laughing, the whole day is laughing. We just laugh the whole time."

Finding Love Amid & After Cancer

There are really two cancer love stories here: Swoboda has found love amid a cancer battle, and Winebrenner has found love again after losing his spouse to cancer.

In Winebrenner's case, grief is inevitable and essential when you're forced to say goodbye to your spouse. There's no one way to cope, but, in a previous interview with SurvivorNet, widower Doug Wendt shared his thoughts on the grieving process after losing his wife to ovarian cancer.

'I Don't Want to Move On; I Do Want to Move Forward': Doug Wendt On Being a Caregiver and Tragically Losing His Wife to Ovarian Cancer

"We're never gonna move on, I don't even think I want to move on, but I do want to move forward," Wendt says. "That's an important distinction, and I encourage anybody who goes through this journey as a caregiver, and then has to face loss, to think very carefully about how to move forward."

Winebrenner indeed moved on, finding love with Swoboda. In Swoboda's case, reclaiming yourself, as well as your sexual desires, is extremely important when confronted with a cancer battle. Sex is an important part of any relationship, and women often experience a "fight or flight" response after a diagnosis, where surviving each day is the primary concern and sexual pleasure is not.

Dr. Daynelle Dedmond, a gynecologic oncologist with Centura Health in Colorado, tells SurvivorNet that patients often ask her, when it comes to their sexual health, why their libido has changed. "That's a very complicated question," she says.

"Libido is not something simple, especially in women, versus libido in men," she continues. "In men, it's very hormonally regulated, but in women, there's a large psychological aspect to libido, and it doesn't always have to do with your hormones."

Reclaiming Your Sexual Desire After Cancer

Many women have a small portion of their libido affected while going through menopause, she says, "but the largest portion up to 95 percent of their ideology of their lack of libido is really their mood, their emotional status and how they feel about their body (and) their new body image."

It's also how they feel about their relationships, the support they're getting from their partners, the sensitivity of their partners, as well as being able to maintain a friendship and a close relationship where intimacy is allowed to happen in a somewhat normal fashion.

When it comes to Winebrenner and Swoboda, they're partners in this cancer battle. "I want to be your partner in this," Winebrenner tells Swoboda. "I want to be part of this whole thing." He's doing it because he loves her.

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