He was fading away at home near Mangoplah after more than year of battling aggressive liver cancer while waiting for a transplant.

"The timing's got to be right ... in my case we really left it to the last few seconds," Mr Kirkpatrick said.

He received a call from his doctor on November 9, 2017 who said a suitable organ donor had been found.

"He said, 'Can you be in the emergency at the Royal Prince Alfred [Hospital] at 6am?'," Mr Kirkpatrick said.

"I said I'd be there, because I wanted this so badly. I never gave up."

Mr Kirkpatrick's wife, who he said had already been holding the family together, drove all night on the Hume Highway to get him to Sydney in time.

Mr Kirkpatrick, now aged 60, said waking up in the hospital's intensive care unit felt like being run over by a bus.

"But in saying that, I knew - 12 hours after surgery - that I was better," he said.

Mr Kirkpatrick, a cattle farmer and agricultural consultant with four children, said he knew his 2016 cancer diagnosis was "a death sentence".

"To my specialist right at the start, when she said, 'Don, you have primary liver cancer' ... I said, 'I've got way too much going on in my life. I'm too busy to die'," Mr Kirkpatrick said.

"I said, 'Righto, I'll do whatever it takes'."

Federal health department figures show Australia's organ and tissue donation rate has more than doubled in recent years, but 1700 people are currently waiting for a transplant.

In 2019, 548 people became organ or tissue donors in NSW, each of whom would have helped up to seven people.

Intensive care unit nurse Roylene Stanley is the 'organ donation clinical champion' at Wagga Base Hospital, whose role includes supporting families of known or potential organ donors.

"It's one of the hardest decision they'll ever have to make," Mrs Stanley said.

"Something that does make it easier for them is knowing if their loved one does want to be an organ donor or not ... especially if you have a big complex family."

Mrs Stanley said seven people in Wagga have become organ donors in the past two years.

Mr Kirkpatrick said he wrote a letter to the family of the anonymous man who gave him the gift of returning to a normal life.

"I spoke from the heart and just said it's kept a family together," he said.

"I think what we need to do as a society is normalise the conversation around organ donation."

To register as an organ donor visit: donatelife.gov.au/register-donor-today

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