For a mild sprain, home care is not a treatment you apply to her leg; it is strict rest you build around her whole day. A sprain is a stretched or strained soft tissue injury around a joint, and tissue like that heals while it is unloaded and re-injures easily while it is not. Your job is to manage her environment so thoroughly that she does not have to make good decisions herself, because an improving dog will vote for stairs, sofas, garden squirrels, and play long before her leg is ready for any of them.
Setting Up Strict Rest
Confine her to one calm area: a pen, a gated corner, or a single room with non-slip flooring, her bed, water, and something quiet to chew. Block stairs with a gate rather than trusting her to avoid them, lift her or use a ramp for any necessary step, and keep her away from slippery floors where a splay can undo days of progress. She stays on a lead for toilet walks only: out, a few unhurried minutes on grass for her to relieve herself, no wandering the garden, no meeting other dogs, and straight back in. Keep the lead on even in your own garden, because one sudden lunge at a bird loads the injured leg at full force. Other dogs in the house need separate play during her rest period, and children should visit her in her rest area with calm activities, stroking, grooming, and quiet company, rather than games that wind her up.
Feed her in her rest area, keep her routine predictable, and expect boredom to be the hardest symptom to manage. She does not need entertaining exercise; she needs sleep, which is when tissue repair does its work, and brief calm attention spread through the day. Use only what your vet advises on the leg itself: if your vet has suggested a cold pack or heat, follow their timing and instructions exactly, and if they have not suggested either, do not improvise. Never give her human painkillers, and give nothing medicinal that a vet has not directed for her, because masking pain lets her use a leg that still needs unloading.
What Improvement Looks Like, Day by Day
Steady improvement has a recognisable shape. In the first day or two she may still favour the leg noticeably, resting it when standing and limping at a walk, though she should be settled, eating, and willing to put the foot down. Across the following days the limp should lessen, she should bear weight more evenly at rest, move more willingly on toilet walks, and show less swelling where swelling was present. By several days in, you are looking for clear, continuing progress rather than perfection: a mild remaining limp that is visibly better than it was is a different picture from a limp that has stalled. Change one variable at a time when she is clearly improving; toilet walks can become marginally longer on your vet's advice, but stairs, jumping, off-lead time, and play return only when her vet or the agreed rest period says so, not because she looks keen.
When She Needs Rechecking
Book her back in, or phone her clinic the same day, if she worsens at any point, if she stops bearing weight on the leg, if swelling increases rather than settling, if she becomes unsettled, off her food, or distressed, or if a few days pass without steady improvement. A sprain that does not improve on schedule may not be a simple sprain, and only an examination, sometimes with imaging, can sort a joint injury, a fracture, or another cause from a soft tissue strain. Keep brief dated notes during her rest: how much weight she bears, how the swelling looks, and how she moves on toilet walks, because that sequence is what her vet will ask for first. Those notes sit naturally alongside her examination findings in her Pet Passport on KinsLe, giving the clinic her recovery story in order.